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CHANGING FOR BETTER
NAA Chairman Richard D. Gottlieb, in his keynote for the Press and Materials Segment, told operations professionals that newspapers have made significant gains in readership and revenue. They better serve readers and advertisers, and sell more than 56 million newspapers daily.
"The reason I've been able to throw out the numbers I just did is that this industry has worked very hard to earn them," he said. "We looked at what was coming at us and we got scared. You can do two things in that situation. You can stand there like a deer in the headlights and hope that what's coming won't hit you. Or you can move. We moved."
Newspapers have rebuilt themselves, investing heavily in equipment and embracing hot new technologies "to deliver on our customers' rising expectations," he said.
He called on solution providers to pay attention to changing needs of the newspaper industry. "We are looking to you to give us more speed, more flexibility, better quality, better color reproduction."
Several suppliers discussed solutions intended to do just that. Heidelberg technical sales specialist Peter Walczak announced the company will put into production next year the Mainstream 80, a press built especially for newspapers and a first for the company which offers equipment in every other area of newspaper operations.
Peter Milton, chief executive of Operation Backup, showed a radio tracking tag system for newspapers that tracks press use, web problems and more. It is in use now in Great Britain.
Lois Niland, manager of new-business development at Xerox's production group, talked of a wave of new uses for digital-printing technology. The company's equipment is being used to deliver custom editions from German production plants to New York hotels, for example. It has also been used for "instant" papers at major events such as a visit by First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton by the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle.
--by Bob Sims