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GraphExpo_ShowDaily_September_27_2016

Newspapers Are Getting Personal News Print—The Newspaper Pavilion demonstrates how personalization and digital technologies impact every facet of the industry. News Print—The Newspaper Pavilion is back again this year, and now more than ever, it is demonstrating that personalization and digital technologies are impacting every facet of the print industry. There are more digital presses in newspaper operations than ever before, and while offset is still the top technology for the traditional, longer runs, more and more opportunities are popping up for editions and projects that have 5,000 or fewer copies. And that niche is where digital technologies are stepping in, and allowing newspaper publishers and printers to truly start thinking outside of the box. Mary L. Van Meter, the Publisher and Editor in Chief of News & Tech (Booth 827), noted that digital presses are opening up whole market segments that traditional newspaper printers could never even consider before. Applications such as colleges, religious institutions, or other shorter-run community newspapers can be cost-effectively produced on the smaller scale, allowing newspaper printers to compete for work that until now, they just couldn’t produce. “Digital technology gives an operation the ability to expand what markets it can serve,” she says. Digital technologies are also opening up the possibilities of taking newspapers beyond simple versioning. While it hasn’t yet caught on in the U.S., in some parts of the world what’s known as hyper-local newspapers are starting to gain more traction. And this type of newspaper simply can’t be produced on traditional offset equipment—the runs are just too small. These papers place a heavy emphasis on local news, local stories, and even local advertisers. As the movement continues to gain in popularity, and both publishers and advertisers continue to fi gure out the best ways to approach this type of format, the daily paper of tomorrow could be very different from one section of a city to the next. Rather than focus on big name advertisers with broad appeal, those hyper local editions could feature sponsors from the local businesses, with a heavy emphasis on the types of advertising that work best for the very specifi c demographic that version of a paper would go to, rather than the entire city as a whole. That doesn’t mean those big names would disappear, just that the revenue stream could switch from being a few strong threads to a large number of smaller ones. And the content will follow suit, as publishers begin to write stories and cover the events that are happening on a street and neighborhood level, rather than city-wide. But the industry isn’t there yet. Versioning, with the most popular application being a morning and evening edition, has been popular in the U.S. for some time, but the market isn’t ready to tip toward a more personal approach just yet. However, digital technologies are improving at a rapid pace, with applications and run lengths that would have been in the red just a few years ago now paying for themselves—or even showing a profi t. And that evolution of technology and the personalization of newspapers will only continue. Offi cial Show Daily | PrintingNews.com GRAPH EXPO 16 | September 27, 2016 | 53


GraphExpo_ShowDaily_September_27_2016
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