One of the areas where major future business growth is seen is in newspapers adopting high-speed inkjet printing as an alternative or replacement for offset printing. The various press vendors all specify newspapers as a key business area for them for the future. Yet when one looks at the market newspapers have just not moved in any way to adopt the technology. There are newspapers printed by inkjet printing but these are all being done by print service providers using their print capacity to print ‘international’ newspapers in overseas territories for delivery at premium prices. This is not new and for example Océ’s Digital Newspaper Network has being printing such newspapers in monochrome on various service providers’ presses around the world for many years. Recently we have seen a number of print service providers introducing color inkjet presses for this work. Most of these have been Kodak Versamark VL4200 presses. The major player in this area has been Miller Group in Malta. They also have sites in Cyprus, Tenerife, L’Reunion, a partnership in London, and have two further European sites coming on stream soon.

Why then is it that newspaper publishers have not adopted digital printing to enhance their business models, particularly in times when newspaper business is going through major change? Recently in London at an event sponsored by Kodak, the UK newspaper publication Production Journal ran a seminar to look at digital newspaper printing. One of the key speakers at this was Jack Knadjian, the business development director for newspaper digital printing solutions at Kodak. I have known Jack for many years and he is a very knowledgeable about the newspaper industry, and I found his comments about digital newspaper printing very interesting. He stated that Kodak has been committed to inkjet technology for newspapers for nine years, but has not been able to get newspaper publishers to say yes to the inkjet press suppliers, that this is what they want for their future. Because of this Kodak diverted much of its R&D funds to support other markets such as commercial printing that are a much bigger challenge. He stated that the newspaper industry just does not have the vision of where it wants to go.

Knadjian stated that with an industry like newspapers that is in trouble, one would think that its people would be looking at ways to be as creative as possible in minimising the trouble they are in. He indicated they are spending too much time fighting their current problems than thinking about new ways to do business. Knadjian said his fear was that although every publishing company around the world is talking digital, they do not see the digital printed newspaper as a digital product. Print does not appear to be a part of their digital thinking. He indicated that publishers should be looking at having a unique product not just having ‘me too’ digital products. He said “you have to be very careful because you are in a world where there are so many other applications.” He continued: “I am not a newspaper publisher but I can think of many things you can to improve the newspaper printed product using inkjet printing that you cannot do with offset which might attract your readers.”