The newspaper industry is like many others going through tough times at present. We are constantly hearing of dropping ad revenues and dropping circulations. Even some of the new types of free newspapers now seem to be finding ongoing growth difficult, as the competition gets tougher.

Most of the discussion about newspapers is about the challenge it is getting from other forms of news distribution and the loss of readership particularly amongst the young. In the UK we are now seeing another major challenge for many newspapers and this is coming from other newspapers. In the past I have written about the massive level of investment that has gone into building large-scale new printing plants that are capable of printing total newspapers in full color throughout. I have questioned the wisdom of these investments wondering where the extra money is to come from to pay for them as ad revenues continue to fall. To indicate the scale of these investments the greatest is from Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation with their new $1 billion printing plants including the massive Newsprinters operation in Broxbourne to the North of London. This facility is reputed to be the largest printing operation in the world.

This operation plus the two smaller plants in Manchester and Glasgow has the capability to print more than 20 million newspapers per day. This is just about the total newspaper requirements for every UK newspaper. While Newsprinters is the largest newspaper printing operation in the UK, and perhaps the world, there are a few others that also have capabilities of printing a huge number of newspapers. These are in particular the updated plants of Trinity Mirror and Associated Newspapers.