What's black and white and read all over? A newspaper, you say? Not anymore. It's still being read, of course, but in many cases it's no longer black and white.
And because many of them have learned to print in color, newspapers are beginning to tap a new opportunity--national advertisers. The Newspaper National Network was created to persuade national advertisers in six under-represented categories to devote ever-larger portions of their budgets to newspapers. NNN works out the many details involved in putting national ads into newspapers across the country. Part of its strategy has been to allow advertisers to reuse their four-color magazine ads.
Some advertisers have found newspaper color quality to be acceptable--but others haven't. Their complaints include poor registration, muddy color, blemished plates, show-through and simply printing the wrong color.
National automobile advertisers have driven home the point that newspapers can produce some real lemons. Chrysler Corp. is a good example. The country's third-largest automaker has been one of NNN's best clients, running a series of full-page, four-color ads in as may as 100 newspapers at a time, says Nick Cannistraro, NAA's senior vice president of marketing. But lack of consistent color quality has sometimes made Chrysler executives blue in the face.
"Readers take colors literally," says Cannistraro, "and if they don't like the color they see in your paper, they may not buy the car." Adds Pat Haegele, president of NNN, "For automobile companies, the color of the car in the ad has to be right--it's one of their primary selling points. The car in the ad is red, but in some newspapers it comes out pink, in some it's purple, and in others it's orange. But red is red."
NNN briefly considered offering advertisers only black-and-white, but changed its stance when it found that 90 percent of print-advertising dollars are spent on color ads. Besides, as Cannistraro points out, "The folks at USA Today make it harder for advertisers to understand why the rest of the newspaper business can't produce high-quality color. We have become reacquainted with why newspapers lost national advertising earlier--it's because, despite our extraordinary reach, advertisers have been disappointed with our ability to print quality color."
How can we handle the shower of complaints? NNN and NAA are responding with an umbrella called the Newspaper Color Reproduction Quality Initiative. NAA's Senior Vice President of Technology Eric Wolferman says NNN's dilemma has forced the issue, already a priority, to the top of his list.
During an on-the-fly meeting of operations managers at NEXPO'96, NAA assembled a task force of newspaper-reproduction experts to map out the color reproduction process--from generation, scanning, processing, enhancement, negative reproduction and plate making, all the way through the press. Solutions range from the very simple (make sure you send the advertiser tear sheets from the best part of your press run) to the more complex.
Under the direction of Wolferman and Director of Newspaper Services Tom Croteau, NAA is developing standards for newspaper printing. According to Croteau, the process is being broken down into five components: human, machine, methods, materials and measurements (see chart).
The initiative will bring a massive body of knowledge into one set of materials, tailored specifically for newspaper people--publishers, production and operations directors, pre-press managers, press managers, press operators, scanner operators and advertising managers. "These people are all responsible for different functions in the quality-process chain," says Wolferman.
Cannistraro adds that higher quality calls for greater attention to detail and a heightened sense of craftsmanship, not just better equipment. "The industry has spent more than a billion dollars in the last couple of years on new pre-press and printing equipment, but it's hard to see where that's paying off," he says.
While none of the color initiative's standards will be mandatory, Wolferman hopes newspapers will want to participate voluntarily. The goal is to achieve the same high-quality reproduction from press to press and newspaper to newspaper.
To achieve this goal, newspapers will need to learn how to correctly calibrate equipment throughout the printing process, even when their equipment comes from many different vendors. A new vendor group called the International Color Consortium is attempting to get its members' equipment talking the same "color language" through the use of standard profiles. The ICC's members include Agfa, Linotype-Hell, Apple, and Adobe, says Croteau.
NAA's color-initiative task force will likely develop checklists, guides, tool kits, workshops, standards, evaluations and awards. NAA may establish a color-quality club similar to one administered by IFRA, the international newspaper technology association. Club membership would be based on an independent evaluation of color reproduction, providing newspapers with bragging rights and advertisers with a list of newspapers that produce high-quality color.
Wolferman will announce more details of the Newspaper Color Reproduction Quality Initiative's strategy in the near future. Cannistraro is optimistic. "Virtually every senior executive on NAA's Board of Directors sees this is as a serious issue," he says.
L. Carol Christopher is president of Christopher Communications in Berkeley, Calif. E-mail, cchristo@weber.ucsd.edu; phone, (510) 444-7841.
Nick Cannistraro, NAA, 11600 Sunrise Valley Drive, Reston, Va. 20191. E-mail, cannn@naa.org; phone, (703) 648-1180; fax, (703) 648-1186.
Tom Croteau, NAA, 11600 Sunrise Valley Drive, Reston, Va. 20191. E-mail, crott@naa.org; phone, (703) 648-1213; fax, (703) 648-1333.
Pat Haegele, NNN, 711 Third Avenue, 6th Floor, New York, N.Y. 10017-4014. E-mail, haegp@naa.org; phone, (212) 856-6380; fax, (212) 856-6343.
Eric Wolferman, NAA, 11600 Sunrise Valley Drive, Reston, Va. 20191. E-mail, wolfe@naa.org; phone, (703) 648-1271; fax, (703) 648-1383.
©1997 Newspaper Association of America. All rights reserved.