Cover: Inching Toward a Targeted Future

Customized editions still a work in progress

By LaShell Stratton | Illustration by Mike Lowery

First Published: October 2008

On the front page of her local newspaper, Jackie, a mother of two, finds an article about a neighborhood robbery, a column about parenting and a feature about a backpacking tour in Mexico, where Jackie plans to vacation with her family this year. As she flips through her paper, she immediately finds half-page advertisements for Macy’s, Pottery Barn and Ann Taylor, three of her favorite stores.

There are no sports or business pages that Jackie might toss aside. Everything she reads and sees grabs her attention. That’s because her personalized edition of the newspaper was created based on the preferences she listed when she filled out a subscription form on the newspaper’s Web site. That information was added to a massive database that was merged into variable-data software, which helped create Advanced Function Presentations (AFP) or formatted pages that were sent to digital presses that print thousands of personalized editions for subscribers.

While it may be possible one day for subscribers to specify what they want to see in their morning papers, “it would require a lot of managing of variability on the newspaper’s part,” says Steve Adoniou, associate director of InfoTrends Inc.’s On Demand Printing and Publishing Consulting Service (www.infotrends.com). Publishers would have to take incremental steps toward the digital future, whichs means trying simpler applications first, he advises. 

As newspapers consider acquiring digital presses for jobs such as printing short press runs of their newspapers in remote areas, more complex opportunities will start to emerge, says Scott Schiller, marketing and business development manager at HP Inkjet High-Speed Production Solutions (www.hp.com). “You’ll start to see the potential for customized publications, customized ads and targeted ads, but you can’t go right out the gate with those capabilities,” he says. “You have to work up to them. Install the presses for short runs first. Allow the critical mass to build up and then consider switching to customization.”

How to Move Forward
Adoniou cites several ways newspapers could work their way into digital printing, including shifting short-run jobs to a digital press. This could benefit smaller newspapers with press runs of less than 10,000. Newspapers also could use their digital presses for commercial work, such as creating personalized direct mail pieces for customers using variable data, he says.

Because of the variable data capability of digital presses, newspapers could create microzoned freestanding inserts or  “version” the newspaper itself by creating different editions of a newspaper based on demographics, says Justin Searles, an InfoTrends consultant. Searles suggests that publishers try printing microzoned newspapers before printing personalized editions. “If you look at the evolution of digital printing in the commercial market, they played with versioning and microzoning first and then moved onto personalization,” he says.

Versioning also could be used as a way to reach readers, such as college students, who may have migrated to other media, Adoniou says.

Some newspapers, including The Arizona Republic in Phoenix and the New York Times Regional Media Group in Tampa, are experimenting with digital printing for marketing and commercial work, but they are in the minority. Despite the additional revenue and advertising opportunities digital printing could bring, most newspapers are reluctant to try it.

“Lately with newspapers there has been less focus on revenue generation and more on cost-cutting,” says Ron Sams, vice president of newspaper sales at manroland North America (www.manroland.us.com). Last year, manroland introduced a COLORMAN XXL integrated with Eastman Kodak Co. (www.kodak.com) Versamark DS6240 inkjet printing system, which enables the press to print variable content at speeds up to 90,000 copies an hour. This content can include ads with unique codes, lottery games or even maps microzoned to a reader’s location. Despite the product’s ability to target readers, selling the idea to newspapers is challenging in this economic environment, Sams says.

Newspapers, however, should not shy away from the opportunities digital printing could offer, says H. Jack Knadjian, vice president of publishing market segment worldwide for Kodak. “Newspapers should do the exact opposite. They should do everything possible to bring back the advertisers,” he says. Digital press manufacturers hope a few pioneering newspapers will make the leap.

Commercial Opportunities
Some newspapers are using digital presses to print commercial work. Republic Direct, the direct mail division of The Arizona Republic, prints personalized direct mail pieces for customers (“Digital Presses Key to Gannett’s Renewal Program,” July/August, p. 46).  Most of the customers are working with Republic Direct as part of advertising contracts they signed with the newspaper, says Bob Peebler, finance manager and advertising general manager for Republic Direct, The Arizona Republic and www.azcentral.com. “We have a lot of furniture and auto retailers that have the same campaign in the newspaper that they have in direct mail,” he says. Only 25 percent of the company’s direct mail commercial work comes from outside the newspaper, Peebler says.

Republic Direct employs one press operator, six sales representatives, a data department and an art department. “We’re a one-stop shop,” Peebler says. The company enhanced its capability in November 2007 when it purchased two Xerox (www.xerox.com)  DocuColor 5000s to add to its five-year-old Canon USA imageRUNNERs (www.imagerunner.com). With its old digital presses, the company was limited to adding only names and addresses in black and white onto four-color shells that were preprinted on an offset press. Now direct mail pieces can be printed entirely in four-color on the digital presses, and Republic Direct has enhanced its variable data capability to content beyond text. “We have the capability to vary photos in pieces now,” he says.

Lately, Republic Direct has had the most success with small businesses, Peebler says. “They order pieces with press runs as low as 500 and up to 10,000,” he says, adding that Republic Direct has seen a 10 percent increase in overall business because of the enhanced capabilities of the Xerox presses.

Outsourcing Digital Printing
Instead of owning digital presses, the New York Times Regional Media Group contracts with a commercial printer, American Marketing & Mailing Services Inc. (www.americanmarketingusa.com), to create personalized direct mail pieces that are sent to potential newspaper subscribers. This year, the Regional Media Group plans to mail 2.2 million marketing pieces printed on American Marketing’s Xerox iGen3s, says Daniel L. Williams, audience development manager at NYTRMG. Almost 75 percent of those pieces will be for subscriber acquisition for the company’s 16 newspapers, he says.

Since the group began printing marketing pieces on digital presses in 2006, response rates from the targeted subscriber acquisition programs have improved from 0.61 percent in 2006 to 0.77 percent in 2008, Williams says. The marketing message to prospects is now better segmented by demographics and between 2006 and 2008, cost per order has declined by 15.4 percent from $81 to $68.50, says Bill Truett, audience strategy director. The decline was due to the centralization of all direct mail programs to one commercial partner, Williams says. Before consolidating acquisition programs, some markets did their own mailings.

NYTRMG decided to outsource the printing to American Marketing because it was more cost effective than buying digital presses and allowed for greater flexibility, Truett says. “If we did not get the response to mailings that we wanted, we could just end the contract and move on,” Truett says. “We wouldn’t have to worry about the press sitting around collecting dust.” 

The company also outsources the warehousing of its proprietary marketing database, which is a hodgepodge of data from Claritas PRIZM NE (www.claritas.com), data housed in Publishing Business Systems software (now Digital Technology International, www.dtint.com) and other third-party sources, to ASTECH InterMedia (www.astech-intermedia.com).

Almost 25 to 30 percent of the content in each mailer changes for each household, Truett says. “We can drop in different graphics, photos and benefits in a piece depending on if the recipients are a young up-and-comer or even a sports fan,” he says. “We no longer target a mass medium.”

Expanding Your Reach
While some newspapers are using digital presses for direct mail and commercial work, others are starting to use the technology to expand the reach of their newspapers through editions printed in remote areas, sometimes in other countries, on digital presses. This approach also would work in areas where a newspaper’s circulation is low or in regions where publishers must fly or ship in copies, HP’s Schiller says.

Since 2001, digital press manufacturer Océ (www.oce.com) has enabled newspapers to print editions nationally and internationally through partnerships with commercial printers. Through the Océ Digital Newspaper Network, newspapers such as The New York Times and The Sydney Morning Herald in Sydney, Australia, transmit print-ready pages to Océ, which sends them to commercial printers who print the pages locally on digital presses. Océ monitors the data flow and production.

This type of remote printing will probably gain even more popularity in Europe where populations are more transient, says Duncan Newton, client development manager at Océ North America Inc. “Since the walls have come down in the European Union, you find a lot of people living in different countries now that are of different nationalities,” he says. Börsen Zeitung in Frankfurt, Germany, uses the network to print an edition of its newspaper in the United Kingdom, which contains local ads.

“The digital world says your newspaper can be wherever you want it to be as long as you find the right digital partner,” Newton says.

Microzoning and Versioning
While remote printing using digital technology is becoming more widespread, only a few newspapers have expressed interest in using digital presses for microzoned or versioned editions. Kodak’s Knadjian believes more U.S. papers should consider microzoning because it could help increase advertising. “The U.S. has so much home delivery of newspapers, unlike other parts of the world,” he says. “You could do advertising campaigns by route or even by street with inkjet technology.”

Investor’s Business Daily in Los Angeles may soon venture into microzoning. O’Neil Data Systems Inc. (www.oneildata.com) announced in May that it plans to explore ways to incorporate variable data into news sections of Investor’s Business Daily, its sister company. According to a press release, the newspaper may be printed digitally on a HP Inkjet Web Press and “could ultimately lead to more relevant and higher-value personalized editorial content and advertising.”

Triblocal.com by Chicagoland Publishing Company Inc. in Oak Brook, Ill., a subsidiary of the Chicago Tribune Co., is using Kodak’s Microzone Publishing Solution to produce 35 Web sites and eight weekly newspapers targeting neighborhoods in suburban Chicago. The software suite includes a microzoned publishing management system that could be adapted for digital printing. Since March 2007, staff writers and community readers have contributed content to the Web sites.

“With a click of a button,” the content is sent to Kodak’s publishing system, which automatically drops everything into Adobe InDesign templates (www.adobe.com), says Kyle Leonard, managing editor for Triblocal.com.

Readers have responded positively to the newspapers, and Triblocal.com has witnessed a slight increase in circulation, Leonard says. The newspapers have a total circulation of 100,000. Although advertiser response has not been as positive, Leonard believes it is a reflection of the current economic climate and its effect on the advertising industry. “We had a conservative estimate of what we should be doing, and we’re close to that,” he says.

Triblocal.com’s eight newspapers are currently printed on an offset press, says Michael Dizon, communications manager for Chicago Tribune Media Group.

Emerging technology from Kodak would allow the newspapers to be printed easily on a digital press, Knadjian says. Kodak's Stream Inkjet technology is ideal for microzoning, he says, and will make digital printing more feasible because it has higher resolution than other digital presses and speeds of up to 1,000 feet per minute when attached to an offset press.

At drupa 2008, an international print technology trade show held in early summer in Düsseldorf, Germany, Kodak showed a prototype of its Stream Inkjet with Muller Martini Mailroom Systems Inc. (www.mullermartinims.com). Kodak’s Stream Concept Printhead ran inline with a Muller Martini Concepta web offset press, says Chris Echevarria, product marketing manager of commercial products at Kodak Inkjet Printing Solutions. Such an application could be used to print microzoned inserts on demand, but Muller Martini is still working on updating many of the features and is not yet ready to discuss the technology, says Matthew McKittrick, its marketing coordinator.

Newspapers have the greatest potential in the digital market if they could print preprints on demand on digital presses, says Owen Smith, NAA vice president of technology applications. Turnover time for preprints could be greatly reduced with a digital press, he says. “What you’ve eliminated is huge transportation costs for the advertisers, and you’re extending their deadlines," Smith says. "Scheduling and buying would become more convenient for advertisers.”

Back to the Future
When it comes to newspapers and digital printing, anything is possible, Adoniou says. “We could see more microzoning and localized and relevant versioning becoming more common in the near future,” he says. Personalizing newspapers for individuals also is a possibility, although the biggest issues will be implementing the proper workflow to support the application and monitoring quality control to maintain manufacturing standards, Adoniou says.

First, though, newspapers must try digital applications. Unfortunately, there just isn’t the appetite to go exploring right now, says Bob Kotwasinski, vice president of production at The Arizona Republic. “The industry is so fragile in terms of revenue losses and circulation decline that many [publishers] want to just maintain their core products,” he says.

Despite the obstacles, publishers should be more proactive in finding more diverse solutions, Adoniou says. Printing newspapers remotely with digital presses or printing microzoned or versioned editions will allow publishers to develop a closer relationship with readers through more relevant content.

“Newspapers have to develop a plan to retain readers,” he says.