The eyes of the world’s press are focused on Jersey. There is no major international summit taking place in the Channel Islands, rather a project which could make or break the idea that inkjet printing will ever be able to take on the printing of national newspapers on an equal footing with offset printing.
It is an urgent issue. Newspaper circulations are tumbling and the behemoth presses that were installed a decade or so ago are looking increasingly like dinosaurs, not fit for purpose as the dynamics of newspaper publishing are changing.
The Jersey Evening Post was suffering more than most, with a Goss installed 40 years ago as a mono-only machine. It had been adapted over the years to offer some colour and kept alive through scavenging parts from around the world.
But everyone at publisher Guiton Group knew that this would need to be retired after having provided sterling service over the decades according to chairman John Averty. The recommendation was investment in a Goss Magnum, a compact press designed for just this type of operation.
However, the Channel Islands pose another problem, one that has been talked about for at least a decade or more. As part of the United Kingdom, its residents want to read the same papers as other parts of the UK without paying a premium to do so.
This has been achieved by flying in bundles of newspapers each night to Jersey and Guernsey with onward delivery handled by Guiton and local distributors.
The system has cost something like £5 million a year to run, considered good value when the service started. But flights have always been vulnerable to local weather conditions, because fog can close the airports for around 30 days a year. On these days there are no sales at all.
Add in the extra hassle created by increasing security issues at London’s airports and the general decline in circulation, increasing the relative cost of each paper sold, and what had been a solution was starting to become a problem.
An answer lay in printing digitally, something that has been proposed for newspapers ever since colour digital printing emerged in the 1990s. Fifteen years ago Stroma Print in west London began printing copies of overseas newspapers for consumption by foreign nationals in London and then Miller, a Malta news distributor, began printing copies of the UK papers for Brits on holiday, who were happy to pay a premium for that day’s tabloid rather than one arriving a day late.
Other sites have followed, including CSQ in Italy, sites in La Reunion and so on. Most recently Hansaprint in Finland has been printing copies of the Financial Times and New York Times for local distribution on a Ricoh inkjet press.
Last year in Switzerland, the Walliser Bote became the first regional daily in the world to switch 22,000 48pp copies a day from offset to inkjet printing on a HP PageWide T410 installed for the purpose. But nothing had been trialled on the scale that has been contemplated by the London publishers.
Under the auspices of the Newspaper Publishers’ Association there have been numerous discussions in recent years about the Jersey project. Agreement by some publishers was met by objections by others. In short the numbers did not stack up. And questions remained about quality, adjustments to format and so on. There was no compelling argument in favour of change.
Five years ago the advent of the Kodak Prosper started to change the game. The introduction of the much improved Prosper 6000 in 2014 delivered both speed and potentially quality. And could deliver a more familiar product format.
“I made the first presentation to the NPA about the technology at that time,” says Jack Knadjian, now managing director of KP Services. “And we have been talking about the suitability for Jersey since then. Prosper is very different from first generation inkjet presses which were intended for transactional printing; these presses are designed for commercial printing.
“We began talking about how printing on Prosper could fix the loss of sales problem. Had we only had the Versamark VL, this would have been the wrong solution, but with Prosper we felt we could help.”
In the Publish guise, the Prosper 6000 will run at 300m/min, judged enough to be able to print 35,000 newspapers a night split across two printing machines and four Hunkeler finishing lines. These are in place in a converted warehouse behind the Guiton distribution shed close to St Helier. The warehouse has systems to maintain stability of the environment in terms of temperature and humidity at 40-50%, but it remains a factory rather than an environmentally controlled sealed room.
Part of the process for winning over the publishers was agreeing to the level of quality on a newsprint stock. The potential suppliers made their presentation leading to acceptance of Palm’s recycled newsprint at 48.8gsm. Samples were printed and presented to the committee of production executives who would make the final decision. More samples were produced and the minutiae of production discussed.
But the ultimate decision came down to the economics. When, instead of having one site on Jersey and another on Guernsey as had initially been mooted, the choice became a single site on Jersey and then shipping copies between the islands, the business case began to make sense. Instead of two Prospers in one place supported by another across the sea producing the national papers, the project became two inkjet machines printing in one factory, producing both the titles, the figures started to make sense.
Then came the synchronicity of the Jersey Evening Post needing to replace its geriatric press, opening the possibility that this could be printed by inkjet as well. Its print run is around 17,000 a day, within the realms of offset production currently, but showing a gradual decline which would make depreciation calculations difficult.
Inkjet won out over conventional printing for remote production because the offset option would not have coped with runs below 2,000 copies. This would have been fine for the Daily Mail and those with a larger circulation, but not for other papers.
“As soon as we could include the Jersey Evening Post it became a complete no brainer,” says Knadjian. “Printing everything in one place allows us to be extremely competitive.” He needed to persuade the nationals that this was a long term project with a depreciation cycle to match in order to bring the figures to the right level.
KP Services was set up to operate the plant as a joint venture between Kodak and the Guiton group as the minority shareholder. It took a while to find the right location and then to organise the services needed to operate the site.
After the airport and hospital, KP Services becomes the largest consumer of electricity on Jersey. The only delay to the project came because venting to the outside unexpectedly needed a chimney which required a planning approval.
It would replace the old print operation built around the conventional press, platemaking and so on, but the sorting and distribution would remain the same. For Knadjian, the agreements in place would mean that the press was loaded from day one. “The advantage for everyone from this technology was overwhelming,” he says. “This is what persuaded Philip Cullimore, Kodak’s senior VP in charge of enterprise inkjet, to back the project.”
There is a huge overhead saving from not having platemaking nor those operators and national newspapers would not lose sales on fog-bound days. Now there is also the potential to take on other work.
Knadjian floats the idea of running coloured inkjet reels for mainland companies that do not yet have this capability and lack the demand to justify investment in continuous feed inkjet colour.
“By using both machines in high quality mode, we can run at 400m/minute,” he says. This could be attractive for those who want to test inkjet for magazine or catalogue printing. For transitional printers it is like switching offset preprint for digital preprint and less appealing perhaps.
There will also be a demand locally for leaflets, marketing collateral and perhaps books, harking back to the days when the Guernsey Press was a substantial book printer.
Malcolm Miller is a non-executive director of KP Services and brings with him experience of creating a market in digital newspaper printing. When cruise ships call in at Malta, passengers can order a printed copy of their favourite publication. An order before 11pm will result in a paper at breakfast time.
For the moment, settling in the national newspapers has been a priority and not without its hiccups. KP Services went live with the Jersey Evening Post, running this for a couple of weeks before starting to print the national titles, at first in parallel with the flight in.
In the first couple of days, inkjet printed newspapers hit the streets because the weather had closed in and the plane could not land. There were no complaints from readers, just a little confusion because there was an assumption that there would be no papers on that day. It was an early vindication for the service.
However, there have been teething problems along the process. Some are mundane. At an early stage, each newspaper declares how many pages will be needed for that night’s edition. This is used to create the templates for that title to hold the pages as they flow in from the editor’s desk. But a question like ‘how many pages in today’s edition?’ can be interpreted as how many in the paper just published on Monday when the questioner is referring to how many planned for Tuesday’s edition.
Each paper submits the pagination and the run for that issue and is sending editorial and advertising from 9.00pm onwards. These feed into a Prinergy workflow that drives the jobs to the presses. It handles the preparation for printing, from screening images to optimising the imposition for the Prospers. The finishing line runs with either a 450mm cut off or a 900mm cutoff. There is a slight compromise for the papers, but one that is acceptable.
The Guardian’s Berliner format does not fit this template so has had to be printed in a full broadsheet and then guillotined to size after printing and finishing. So few copies are involved that this is not an issue, though ensuring that the guillotine is up to this task is a new challenge for a newspaper printer.
The two Prospers sit side by side. Again bedding in issues have occurred meaning that at times production has taken longer than projected. This is still a new technology in comparison to a newspaper or litho press and experience is still thin.
If the complexity of a conventional newspaper machine is to do with the paper path, folders and plating up, the complexity of Prosper or other inkjet machines lies in the software. Nevertheless web tensions need to be precise, dryers set accurately and humidity needs to be right for the machine to run smoothly.
Then there are the issues that are unique to inkjet. While the continuous inkjet technology is supposedly more resilient than drop on demand, there will be blocked nozzles resulting in what KP Services is calling “streakers”. These are picked up by the cameras on press and identified to the operators with a red mark on the console. Nozzle compensation kicks in to eliminate these and to identify copies that are sub standard until attention can be paid to the printhead.
The combination of inks and the composition of these is crucial to the financial viability of the project and to achieving the quality that is needed. For that reason Kodak is keeping the details quiet, but the gain for the local readers is that the ink does not come off on a reader’s fingers.
On the Financial Times’ salmon pink paper, which is 45gsm, KP Services has run to 210% total area coverage without loss of quality. “Some tell us that this is better than offset quality,” Knadjian says. “What we are printing is as good as if not better than anything printed at Dayton where the technology is developed.”
The press runs from Hunkeler unwinds to rewind units at the end of each press. The reels then pass to the finishing lines, which running at 150m/min are precisely half the speed of the presses. There are five Hunkelers in position, one as a spare that Knadjian would prefer to keep for the non newspaper projects, but which is likely to return to Switzerland.
As the printed reels unwind, the line sheets, folds and collates each copy of the paper. This is controlled through marks at the start of each new copy and by a data matrix barcode which identifies the individual paper, which title, which number in the sequence and so on. At this point the application is limited in what it is used for, there is greater potential to tap into.
The sheets are folded on an MBO folder, once for the broadsheets and again for the tabloids. Sections are gathered on a collating drum, held in place until the required number of pages is gathered by static. The paper then drops to the delivery conveyor for gathering by someone at the end of the line who stacks these on a pallet.
Where the folder needs to move between one format and the next, there is a pause of a few seconds while the fold plates move into position, but there is no slowing of the production line.
There is the potential for technology at the end of the line to collect and place papers ready for the next stage, or to print in delivery sequence exploiting the power of digital printing.
Currently there is no pressure to do this. Pallets of printed papers are taken a few hundred metres away to the packing shed where the inserts are added, where the sections that have been printed earlier in the week are brought together with the news section of the weekend papers.
This has been another advantage of the new production system says Knadjian. “We used to be restricted to bundles of 70 or 80 papers, now we can provide 50 copies in a bundle if that is what is needed,” he says. “This is a level of flexibility we did not have before.”
The production method also opens the way to advertising that is different to that carried by the London papers, though again this is not the case currently.
It is also where copies for Guernsey are prepared. This part of the puzzle fell into place when a new business, Iris Freight, was established precisely to run a daily service between the two largest Channel Islands. Surprisingly, a regular service did not exist previously. A 5 tonne capacity vessel has been kitted out to accommodate five waterproof pods that have been designed specifically to protect the newspapers from the ingress of salt water. The pods are double skinned, the papers will be plastic wrapped and the risk from the sea is minimised.
On the journey back the idea is to carry a range of high value goods. Exactly what these will be has not been decided though there have been conversations and ideas are in hand.
In this way KP Services becomes about more than switching one production methods for another. For a population in the Channel Islands digital printing keeps them part of the same conversation as the rest of the UK. It could become the role model for a new way of printing and publishing newspapers.
The UK nationals are already looking at the potential for a similar set up in other remote parts of the UK. It would also apply to locations where centres of newspaper reading populations are spread far apart, Australia, for example, or Japan, says Knadjian. “It would work in Madeira where papers have to be flown in from Lisbon,” he adds.
Kodak has installed two Prosper 6000s at KP Services in Jersey to print the Jersey Evening Post and most of the UK daily press, the first time that digitally printed national newspapers have been available at standard pricing.
The reels from the Prosper presses are delivered to four Hunkeler lines which sheet, fold and accumulate the required number of pages according to the information held in a 2D barcode. The folder adjusts on the fly to keep the line running at 150m/minute.
Jack Knadjian has been an evangelist for digital printing of newspapers and as chief executive of KP Services he has the opportunity to put these ideas in practice. The deal he says fell into place when there was agreement on a single site that could print the Jersey Evening Post as well as the UK national papers. There is ample capacity now to print for both a local and a wider customer base he says.
