Interesting… not that this isn’t common in Europe (including papers with much larger circulations), because a printer with a number of clients can keep the presses rolling 24 hours a day with jobs from multiple clients, thus amortizing costs more efficiently. Since Transcontinental is building a new plant, it will be state of the art (read, highly automated, few operators needed), and the quality of the printing may actually go up. I’ve seen plants in Australia where super high speed presses, machines called inserters and other robots, printed millions of copies of newspapers a day, overseen by a couple small control rooms with a few dozen operators.

The other subtext here is that the Hearst Corporation, like most very large corporations, is really a capital risk management company, not a newspaper company per se. Its management can see the writing on the veritable subway wall for the San Francisco Chronicle and its other newspaper properties: it’s smart to let somebody else take the big capital risk on very expensive printing presses in an era when alternate delivery is growing, and print media are moving increasingly into niches, with business models that are not yet well understood. It is already remarkable that the newspaper business model has endured, amazingly intact, for some 175 years.

Newspaper classified advertising has all but been nuked by Craig’s List and eBay, display advertisers increasingly move purchases to Google and the web and other media. Newspaper readership became stagnant and then started to decline some 3 decades ago. The Audit Bureau of Circulation recorded one of the sharpest declines in circulation in recent history for the 6 months ended September 30.

The best-run newspapers, big and small, still generate excellent margins, but for years now they have needed wave after wave of draconiain staff reductions to acheive those margins. Papers like the Chron, that could once afford its own foreign staff and a beefy Washington presence to write about far away events that impact San Francisco, now find themselves, after multiple layoffs, hard pressed even to cover the fast growing, ever more complex and diverse Bay Area.

If the print newspaper business crashes, Transcontinental will migrate its plant to packaging, or very likely in the near future, printing disposable electronic goods like pre-paid cell phones on recyclable paper substrates or super-cheap RFID devices that double as printed price tags. Decoupling press from newspaper makes a lot of sense at the dawn of the 21st century, and may actually free the Chron to focus more sharply on newsgathering, editing and delivering the product where, when and how the customer wants it.

BTW, I have struggled in a past life to get a decently-printed color paper out of those venerable (former) San Francisco Newspaper Agency presses. The people who use them nowadays work wonders, trust me. Those presses were designed long before the notion of newsprint color reproduction was even a wish. Notwithstanding, I loved to go through the old Mission Street pressroom, especially when the press was stopped. The gangways of the stories-tall machine were coated with grease and ink – you couldn’t walk the gangways or go up the steep, slippery stairs, almost ladders, without getting long streaks of indelible black crud all over your clothing.

You’d watch men in filthy overalls with folded square newspaper caps fashioned to keep the ink and grease out of their hair, struggling to change plates, adjust ink fountains, fix gearboxes and in the deepest basement, teams of big men used long metal pry bars to move giant rolls of newsprint that weighed tons into position to mount on the press (a job now done by robots). An era passes… I have been on both sides – Union (mostly) and management – of the issue… therein lie a tale for another day…

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