Chron to outsource printing of paper starting in 2009
Posted on November 18, 2006
Filed Under All, Technology |
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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6 Responses to “Chron to outsource printing of paper starting in 2009”
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Keep telling the tale . . . you saw it up close, but locally, Journal Communications is squeezing out smaller printers, idling similar press antiques still visible from streetside viewing galleries at the downtown HQ (a sort of symbolic openess representing a ‘free press’ ?), while actual printing occurs in an anonymous expanse of suburban industrial shed. Then there is QuadGraphics, largest printer in the world (I think), with acre upon acre under roof (north of Lomira on Google maps is just one of many, but one of the largest - note small parking lots) out in the low-cost labor countryside churning out coated paper mags and ads of all titles and circulations from mega-rolls made up the road at the largest concentration of paper mills in the world (if I recall correctly) in the Fox Valley by Green Bay.
The founder of QuadGraphics, Harry Quadracci, was a real original local tycoon, so humble and revered in the pr, but notorious for his far-flung parties. Was in NYC on Sep 11, 2001 and never got over the shock of the attacks. Drowned at his lakeside estate early one summer morning swimming alone on too many anti-depressants. What a loss.
Earth to Greg: get a blog! It’s not that your comments aren’t welcome here, they most surely are: I actually think a lot of gulker.com readers come for your comments, not my posts.
You’re insightful, thoughtful and smart… you should be blogging. I will link…(for what that’s worth)…
[…] The L.A. Times Pressman’s blog has linked to my note about the Chron outsourcing its printing starting in 2009. I didn’t touch on the topic of jobs in my earlier post. It’s a hard issue, and I have some hard experience with same. It’s close to bedtime for me - my chemo regimen starts one hour before bedtime - so I don’t have time enough now to walk through this tonight (though in a different epoch I would have stayed up al night to finish this). […]
Hi Chris,
Your article on outsourcing of the San Francisco Chronicle to Transcontinental has sent a shock throughout my body, and that of my co-workers in the pressroom of the Los Angeles Times.
I have always said I’m glad were not located in San Diego, because the job of producing a newspaper so close to the border could mean outsourcing to Mexico, so I felt a bit safe.
Locally, The Daily Breeze outsourced all production to Southwest Offset in Gardena, and I’m certain other small publications will follow suit.
But a newspaper like the Chronicle, with a circulation of 432,957, being outsourced will send shockwaves throughout the country, at least for us blue collar workers.
As we watch the circulation of the Los Angeles Times fall from over one million copies per day to just over 700,000 per day, makes us printers wonder how much longer our services will be needed?
Ed-
Ed-
Thanks for your comments. I’ve been in your shoes: the waiting and uncertainty are never fun.
I’ll be writing a longer piece about this in the near future, for posting on this blog. The world is changing: it’s changing faster than ever before. The fact that guys like the Chron and Times press men and women run first class facilities 24×7 does not by itself mean that wrenching changes, like the ones looming in S.F., aren’t going to happen.
I think, and have thought for ten years now that labor - by which I mean competent, experienced workers, the kind you probably see daily in the Times pressroom - need a new business model as it were, and modern unions should give up their 19th-century strategies (not that they weren’t great once upon a time) for something that addresses the realities of global labor forces in a ‘flat’ and very wired world.
Stay tuned…
This is truly a great blog. You got me interested. Keep up on posting such interesting subjects. James Spade from HealthReviews.org