Nov 17 2009 09:47 AM
Re: Joe L. Piniero
My favorite daily says your favorite daily says 'not to worry - we'll be around for a while...we hope'.
 November 17, 2009 Advertising With New Presses, Daily News Is Betting on World of Print By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA  The paper's new presses are more efficient and computerized than the ones from the mid-1990s they replaced. They require less labor, electricity and water while generating less waste paper. WITH advertising and circulation falling, and with publishers pessimistic about their prospects of bouncing back, newspapers are slashing expenses these days, not finding new ways to spend enormous sums of money. Industry executives and analysts regularly field questions about how much longer ink-and-paper media will be with us. But Mortimer B. Zuckerman, owner of The Daily News, insists he has no use for such conventional wisdom, and the proof sits in an isolated patch of Jersey City waterfront with a splendid view of Lower Manhattan and the back of the Statue of Liberty. There, he has sunk more than $150 million into expanding the newspaper’s printing plant, installing advanced high-speed presses — a statement of faith that print will still be big business for another decade or two, if not longer. As of this month, The Daily News can print full color on every page; executives say it is the only large paper in the country with that capability. The question is whether the investment makes business sense; the answer may never be made public because the privately held paper does not disclose its financial performance. Mr. Zuckerman signed the deal for the equipment almost two years ago, before the drop in advertising turned into a free fall, and before the weekday circulation of The Daily News fell to less than 550,000, from more than 700,000. He conceded that the paper, which had been marginally profitable for years, is at “worse than break-even.” “I’ve been a contrarian for my entire business career,” said Mr. Zuckerman, a real estate mogul who also owns the magazine U.S. News & World Report. He said he understood skepticism about his Daily News investment, but “my commitment here is to the long term.” The new presses are more cost-efficient and provide an improved printing quality that appeals to advertisers. The Daily News hopes the look will lure readers, too. And there is enough excess capacity to print other papers, a prospect The Daily News is exploring. Until recently, the paper was using presses that were older, with poorer color reproduction than its rival tabloid, The New York Post, whose printing plant in the Bronx opened in 2001. “The idea that this is a good investment isn’t crazy, and advertisers do like it when you improve the print quality, but it’s very hard to see into the future of this business,” said Rick Edmonds, a media business analyst at the Poynter Institute, a school for journalists. “I think we’re getting into a period where the industry is divided into those papers that retain their presses, and print other papers as well, and those that shut down their presses and outsource printing.” Aesthetically, the results are impressive: the color photographs and graphics are as good as anything on newsprint, and the pages are crisp, without the smudges and pinholes typically found around the borders of newspapers. As important as that can be to readers, it may matter more to advertisers — and papers generally charge more for color than black-and-white ads. “It pops much better than before,” said Paul Chapman, vice chairman and president of ABC Carpet and Home, whose ads in The Daily News now clearly show the multicolored patterns of Middle Eastern rugs. At other papers, “you can’t get the detail we’re getting now with The Daily News.” “We advertised before with them, but we did not get nearly the same response from the customer,” he said, adding that his company had doubled the number of its ads in The Daily News since the new presses started turning. Sleepy’s, the mattress store chain, recently bought an ad in the paper’s weekend leisure section, Your New York, that spread across two pages with an irregular shape, giving the impression of being entwined with the article next to it — a layout that would have been much harder to do with the old presses. “I thought that made everything more interesting — time will tell the impression it makes,” said David Acker, president of Sleepy’s. As for the picture quality, he said, “it definitely is an upgrade.” Newspaper advertising may continue to decline, but The Daily News stands to get a bigger share of it, said Marc Z. Kramer, chief executive of the company. “I’m not going to tell you we’re going to get back to the advertising we had in 2000,” he said, “but when an advertiser wants to do print, we think they’re going to choose us.” Until the plant expansion, The Daily News could carry insert ads — the pamphlets preprinted for retailers like Target and Rite Aid — only on weekends, but now it can include them any day of the week. The new presses, by Koenig & Bauer of Germany, and related machinery from Ferag of Switzerland, are far more efficient and computerized than the plant’s original equipment from the mid-1990s. They require less labor and electricity, they generate much less waste paper, and installing printing plates and getting the presses running takes much less time. Automated equipment selects rolls of paper from a rack the height of a three-story building, slides them into presses and later cleans the presses and vacuums paper lint. “We didn’t do this to lose money, and we’re not going to lose money,” Mr. Kramer said. He would not say how much was saved on operations, but put it at “lots of millions.” The new presses print more than three times as fast as the old ones, which will allow The Daily News to push its deadlines much later into the night, giving it an advantage on breaking news like late sports results. For decades, The Daily News called itself “New York’s picture newspaper” — its logo includes a stylized drawing of an old Speed Graphic camera — but that identity has faded. Martin Dunn, the editor, said he intended to revive it, with bigger, better photos and more of them. “We’ve got many, many plans, but I would be nuts to tell you all of them,” he said. Where most newspaper executives talk of managing a continued decline in circulation, Mr. Dunn, Mr. Kramer and Mr. Zuckerman talk about selling more copies. Mr. Zuckerman predicted that some newspapers, including his, would be thriving a generation from now, but added, “the fact is, we don’t know.” “Anybody who goes into this at this stage of the game with an excessive degree of optimism,” he said, “is incredibly naïve.” |
