Evolving trends present a number of challenges, but also opportunities, to newspaper publishers. The newspaper industry has started to embrace new business models such as decentralized production, shorter press runs, special editions, micro-zoning, and individualization.

MyPrintResource provides an in-depth look at two such production trends in Europe. The first is a hybrid inkjet solution delivering 40,000 digitally printed and folded newspapers in five hours. The second is an innovative concept offering customized news content.

The aforementioned hybrid, integrated solution, from manroland web systems and Océ, is working well for French contract printer Rivet Presse Edition, the first official customer, the partners reported at drupa in May. Under terms of the contract, distribution-optimized newspapers are being produced in different formats — broadsheet or tabloid; long grain and short grain. Both national and regional dailies, as well as foreign editions, are printed for delivery to outlets in a defined area around Limoges, France, some 90 minutes from a new, $13 million production plant.

Printing is achieved on two Océ JetStream 4300 color inkjet presses with 30-inch reel widths that produce offset-like-quality digital newspapers at speeds of 656 feet per minute. But postpress finishing is the key to speed in this process, which is where manroland’s back-end expertise comes into play.

“Publishers across the world are increasingly looking to digital color printing with all its efficiency and cost benefits as a vehicle to produce additional income streams, particularly for advertising, in an increasingly tough marketplace,” said Sebastian Landesberger, executive VP of Océ Production Printing Systems. “Rivet Presse Edition is among the innovative commercial printers who are using world-beating systems (of) Océ and manroland to open up many new doors for very targeted, niche, regionalized, and personalized products produced whenever they want. This is something the newspaper industry has been waiting for. It’s here, it’s now, and we’re right at the forefront of developments.”

Called the Synapse project and developed in cooperation with Rivet Presse, which publishes the regional French daily L’Echo, the cutting-edge business model may open up new editorial opportunities for publishers. The newspaper of the future can be built on variable content to create a “new and stronger” relationship with readers, according to manroland and Océ, and help rebuild circulation and advertising revenues as well as improve interaction between print and new media.

The digital process offers a new economic model supporting “editorial innovation,” said Christian Sirieix, director of Rivet Presse Edition. Some of the leading names in France are expected to sign up for the commercial operation. In the future, newspapers will still have the same core news and features, but readers can receive their own personal content according to their own specific interests or their region of interest.

In the fold

manroland has devised a groundbreaking format-newspaper folding device to create the fully automated production lines that can produce up to 40,000 newspapers in variable formats in five hours. The fully variable, digital, pin-type folder VPF 211 offers the possibility to produce broadsheet or tabloid newspapers in long grain and short grain with different structures. Printing digitally on demand offers publishers a new way of working and enables costs of production and distribution to be reduced, according to the OEM partners. Rivet Presse Edition also is beginning complementary printing activities during the day shift. These commercial applications, based on variable data, help balance the business model.