When Rupert Murdoch announced plans for the world’s largest printing plant for newspapers, the move was seen as a vote of confidence for the future of print. One year after the 650-million-pound (US$917 million, €704 million) project began operations, it has become something more – an outsourcing success story and a symbol of print’s viability in the digital age.
News International’s Newsprinters operation will be the subject of a featured presentation at the World Association of Newspapers first Power of Print conference, be held in Barcelona, Spain, on 27 and 28 May next.
The presentation, by Ian MacDonald, News International’s Managing Director Operations and a guiding force behind the project, will examine how such mammoth operations – larger than 20 football fields — are a growing printing option for newspaper companies looking to use outsource printing operations to consolidated printing facilities.
Newsprinter’s plant in Broxbourne, England, north of London, contains 12 state-of-the-art, full colour manroland Colorman XXL presses. The largely automated plant can produce 3.2 million newspapers each night. In addition to all of News International titles (including the Times, Sunday Times, The Sun, News of the World and thelondonpaper), the Broxbourne plant and two others print The Telegraph Media’s Group’s 900,000 copies daily, and 650,000 on Sunday.
Most of the UK national titles have purchased new presses in the past 3 to 5 years, investing both in print quality and in the future of their titles. Some experts say that large centralized printing operations give newspaper companies a growing option to outsource their printing operations now and in the future.
The Power of Print conference is the first global conference for senior newspaper executives to explore new opportunities and successful strategies exclusively for the printed newspaper. Although digital innovation is a primary area of newspaper industry development, print and advertising continue to fund these new ventures, as well as being the profit centres for the vast majority of newspaper companies, even in these tough times.
The Power of Print conference, on 27 and 28 May, will be followed by the World Newspaper Advertising Conference, on the 28th and 29th May, at the Hotel Rey Juan Carlos I in the heart of Barcelona. Full details of the Power of Print conference can be found here.