The days of digitally printed newspapers seem to be finally arriving. This is not to say that we have not had such newspapers before. In fact in the past week I have received information from Océ that at their largest digital newspaper printing operation at Stroma in London, the five millionth digitally printed newspaper copy has rolled off their Océ monochrome presses after eight years of operation. It prints eight international newspapers every day and overall prints between 6 - 70 titles perday with run lengths from 5 to 500 copies. Later this year Stroma plans to expand its current Océ DemandStream 8090 press with inkjet JetStream technology to be able to offer color newspaper printing.  Stroma is a member of the Océ Digital Newspaper Network that between them have printed more than twenty million newspaper copies around the world. We also have the situation of digital color newspaper printing. The first of these is in Portugal at Digital Printing Services, a member of the VASP Group. VASP is a major newspaper distribution company in Portugal. Digital Printing Services has two Agfa Dotrix color presses and Xerox continuous feed monochrome presses. Recently we have also seen Newsworld in the UK make installations of Screen Truepress Jet520 presses in New York and Dubai for newspaper printing. All of these above installations are not run by newspaper companies but by print service providers to print international newspapers in their specific country, and most of them print a variety of different international newspapers on their presses as well as using the presses for other work when newspapers are not being printed. This can be shown for example by the Newsworld press in New York that is printing the UK Daily Mail, being installed by AlphaGraphics who will use it for printing non newspaper work.

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Is This the New Newspaper Production Model?

What we are now seeing is a very significant move and this is a newspaper printer is installing a digital color press for the production of domestic newspaper titles. Imcodávila one of the leading Spanish contract newspaper printers (Océ in their press release incorrectly refer to Imcodávila as a newspaper publisher), located 100 Km from Madrid, is installing an Océ JetStream 2200 to print up to 40 different domestic titles, a mixture of dailies, weeklies and monthlies. It is anticipated that the average daily print run will be 6,000 80-page color newspapers.

Océ state that Imcodávila has the capacity to produce ten times as many newspapers as any other Océ Digital Newspaper Network production site in the world. Among the titles Imcodávila produces include La Vanguárdia, Diario de Ávila, Público, 20 minutos and Diario de Salamanca, with national and local distribution. It is a mid-size newspaper printer running three MAN Uniset offset newspaper presses and a Ferag mailroom, and can produce up to 96 full color tabloid format newspapers. The following comment was made by Luciano Monedero, Imcodávila's Manager “The installation of an Océ JetStream printing system will help us to provide our customers with a wide range of quality publications in full color. This decision is fully in line with Imcodávila's commitment to innovation in the editorial business.” What will be interesting to see is how Imcodávila implements the new system and whether they will integrate digitally printed newspaper sections with offset sections in the mailroom.

There has been discussion for many years about the potential of printing newspapers digitally, but up to now not a single newspaper publisher or contract printer has invested in this technology. The reasons for going digital include short run newspaper production, targeted zoning and micro-zoning in small runs to combine with an offset newspaper, targeted advertising, again to link with an offset printed newspaper, and special promotions and features. The business model for these has been difficult to assess and up to now while many newspapers have looked at making investments in the technology, only Imcodávila so far has made the move.

In today’s financial climate where we are seeing newspaper-advertising revenues dropping substantially few newspapers appear ready to make a major investment into an unproven business model. The model for printing international newspapers in specific cities that have a market in airports, or either a major influx of business people or tourists has been shown to work in some cases, but printing domestic newspapers is a different situation.

The new Imcodávila model will be very interesting to watch to see how a contract newspaper printer develops the approach and what new printing services it offers to its newspaper publisher clients. I will be watching this operation with great interest when they start producing digitally printed newspapers in May.