The parish newsletter appears to have been a victim of the pandemic and lockdown. Where prior to 2020 parish newsletters continued to be printed and pushed through doors or were available in village shops and the church itself, the subsequent lockdowns resulted in a switch to online PDF publication, either by email or on a website.
In many instances this switch was underway and many of the Church of England’s 12,500 parishes had already gone digital – supposedly to save money, perhaps for lack of volunteers, or because of a mistaken belief that print is dying.
This acceleration is hardly surprising. For the duration of the first lockdown at least churches were forced to close; then when opened, singing was banned and social distancing imposed. Many parishioners being elderly, and thus reckoned to be vulnerable and at risk, stayed at home for safeguarding reasons. In many villages these pensioners had formed the delivery team pushing the printed publication through doors.
Now, with lockdown finished, many parishes have taken the decision to stay away from print. The phenomenon has sparked debate in the Church of England (CofE) after an article was published in the Church Times. Has the age of the printed parish magazine passed? The CofE has held seminars on the subject of communication with parishioners and the wider flock, often suggesting that Facebook is the way to communicate the Church’s message.
It isn’t. At least according to some in the CofE. “Using Facebook is a bit like preaching to the converted. I feel there’s still such a strong place for print. It is good to get people away from screens for their own mental health,” says one advocate for print.
Printers up and down the land that include parish magazines in their portfolio have seen numbers decline, particularly those where the product was produced as cheaply as possible. What was once produced on a Gestetner or Roneo Vickers duplicator, had moved on to digital printing. Finishing remained simple: A4 hand folded sheets and stapled. But low production values and a desire not to waste money by the parish committee has made the emailed version more attractive. If the word of God was instrumental in the birth of the European printing industry, the words of the vicar can now be communicated digitally.
Not all parishes think this way. Some are returning to print after the pandemic hiatus. Some realise the value of communication on paper, with well designed pages that are printed on decent paper. And there are printers, frequently small printers, helping parishes to not only create a magazine, but to help produce the advertising that pays for the print run.
Gipping Press at Needham Market, near Ipswich in Suffolk, is among these. Customer services director Danny Cuff says: “Before the pandemic we would produce about 36 parish magazines a month. About 50% decided to have a break during that time. They are all back now.”
It is more than just send the PDF file in, print it and deliver. “We help some of them with the front end part, others are done by volunteers and some are very capable. It’s a wide spectrum,” he says.
The majority of customers are from nearby parishes, some large enough justify printing on its Shinohara litho press. Gipping places great importance on the company’s role within its local community. “We sponsor all sorts of events, often providing print or by sponsoring the event’s programme,” Cuff says. “With the village or parish newsletters we will also run a free to attend editors’ workshop.” This was put on hold during the pandemic as was publication of the magazines. “When we stopped for a period, it was bit worrying, to wonder whether they would come back. But so far only one has not come back,” he says.
Easiprint is not a million miles from Gipping Press. It has its factory in Peterborough, but as its name suggests has a different business strategy to the local print business. It has more of the appeal of an online print business, offering a range of same day turnaround printed products, though retaining the customer contact aspect. There is no mechanism to specify, select and purchase print online. This stance has attracted a number of parish magazines. “We used to do about 15 titles a month,” says director Simon Steward. “Then came Covid and a lot of newsletters decided to stop printing, mainly because they need volunteers to deliver them. Some have not come back.”
Most supply print ready PDF files, but not all. “There’s one where we are paid to put the magazine together, including managing the artwork for ads,” he explains.
There are challenges that are common across the sector. Producing the publication is a voluntary activity, often in the hands of someone who agreed to help out a decade ago and is still in post having discovered they have fallen into a job for life. To add to this, decisions about print or digital will be in the hands of a committee with sometimes strong opinions and some are less open to acceptance of external suggestions.
There is money to be made from producing a newsletter. One parish in Kent generated revenue of £2,649 from copy sales and subscriptions in 2020 with a further £4,278 from advertising, against a print bill of £2,134 for the year leaving a healthy surplus for parish funds of £4,793. The following year, print costs had risen and both advertising and copy sales revenue dropped, but it still contributed £2,777 for the church.
Some of those that have tried sending digital magazines by email have run into list server problems, falling foul, for example, of Google’s controls around Gmail. “These are people that are not always IT savvy and who don’t generally use emailing services,” says Steward. “And as a result they have found themselves banned from Gmail for sending out too many emails at the same time.”
Essentially the parish magazine is a quintessentially English product and sits alongside the village pond, the pub, cricket and Miss Marple in the affections of its readers and as part of the tradition of the English countryside. Its readers can be equally conservative.
“There can be a lot of flak if the price increases from 50p to 60p on a title without the support of advertising revenue,” says Paul Orsborn, director of Parish Mag Printers in Salisbury, a company that, as the name suggests, has a focus on this sector. “Only two or three have fallen by the wayside,” he says, “That’s about 2% of what we do. So if we are not back 100% yet, it’s pretty close.”
The company has grown as parishes switched from duplicators to embrace full colour, often digital, printing. “Practically all started with Roneo duplicators, then as technology evolved with computers, they have added a colour cover and improved the quality from there. The magazines are nothing like they were 10-20 years ago. But there are still hundreds or thousands of village and parish groups that have been producing their own.”
Many of these had ceased print publication during lockdown and will not come back. The dedication needed to type stencils is no longer required and without any idea how to specify print and without a volunteer editor or production person, it is easier to email a digital publication than to print.
Parish Mag Printers has created the National Parish Magazine Awards, with a range of categories to reward best practice in design, content, print and the editor. It is not just for the company’s customers and acts as inspiration to others.
The company has spread its wings beyond the immediate area accounting for titles as far north as Newcastle (though not Scotland) and into Wales. “Admittedly most are in the south of England,” Orsborn continues. “There’s a 50:50 split between A4 and A4 folded to A5 (though there are some that are a weird 2/3 format) and we’ll always get a few people that ask us for advice. We will help where we can – and will not expect them to use us for print when we do.”
The parish committee will have set a budget for the publication and will have a firm eye on meeting this. This may not coincide with the printer’s need to make a profit. This points either to a reduction in quality or to the purgatory that is online publication. If sent out by email, only those that have subscribed with their personal data will receive it. If published online, only those browsing the web or accessing the website will discover it. And there are few digital natives among the established congregations. The printed publication can be delivered to subscribers, be sold over the counter of the local shop or be made available in the church itself.
Parish Mag Printing is not alone in specialising in this type of work. Parish Magazine Printing in Holsworthy, Devon, is another chasing what is regular work. It uses its website to help inexperienced editors to produce a good looking publication, though like others, there is no way to order print through the website.
This is because the majority of customers need some hand holding, explains director Phil Tucker. “The files we receive are never print ready,” he says. The most common issues relate to images: all too frequently the editors have included a 72dpi image from the internet, Facebook or WhatsApp. “I reckon that about one in 30 is print ready. All the others we have to work on and we have to ask for the original image to be sent over. It’s all part of what we do.
“The customers we deal with are not professionals and probably do not understand the specifications required for printing. If it looks OK on their computer screen, they think it will work in print. This does not apply to all. There are some brilliant magazines out there.”
The company has a customer list that has grown from a small few parishes located around the business when Tucker first moved to Cornwall 25 years ago and now extends across the country. Other than its website, which features an old Hoe newspaper press rather than the Ricoh Pro C9200 which is today’s workhorse, there is no marketing. It has grown through word of mouth and inquiries to production of monthly, bimonthly and less frequent titles. The pot pourri makes it difficult to pin down exactly how many, but it is well into three figures, he says. Another influencing factor has been Covid which meant the business went from discussing plans for the coming months in March, to printing just 1,000 sheets in April 2020.
Parish magazine printing was put on hold. Tucker, conscious that many of the contacts and their teams should be self isolating, pushed them not to publish. With the lifting of all restrictions and the worst of the pandemic in the past, printing has recommenced with just two or three that have not returned, perhaps because those previously running them have become indisposed.
Now the challenge is the rising cost of paper and other inputs. “That has made it harder for us because the customer base for parish magazines relies on a few advertisers that are supporting the publication and don’t have a lot of money to spend,” he adds. But they are loyal. Many have been customers for more than ten years and have grown in that time, in confidence and extent.
One publication that Parish Magazine Printing handles expanded from 40pp to 60pp and sometimes 80pp under the drive of a new editor. Now that editor has been forced by the rising cost of paper to retrench. He notes in a recent issue: “The printer has been hit by escalating costs of paper and transport, and so has increased his rates. As a result, I have shortened the magazine from 60 to 52 pages, and made the whole middle section black and white, which costs less to print.”
That village is unlikely to stop producing the 400 copies of what seems to be a highly valued publication, not least too because the area is notorious for the poor quality of its internet connections.
Its relative success poses some of the key questions associated with this style of micro publishing: what happens when key people stop doing it? What happens when the printer stops or needs major parts? There are also other issues typically associated with commercial print.
At the other end of the country in Bolton, Stress Free Print includes parish magazines among the items that can be ordered through the website. Most of the parishes that do so are in Yorkshire, across the Pennines from the Bolton business. “Business certainly dropped off during Covid, but since the end of lockdown demand for these magazines has bounced back,” says customer journey and insights manager Kev Walsh. “They are not as large as previously, perhaps eight pages instead of 20pp or 24pp, not yet at pre Covid levels.” But equally those that have committed previously to production of a paper magazine have remained with paper.
For a company like Stress Free Print the parish magazine is only the first step. There are banners for the village fete, likewise posters for events that are held locally. And there are bookmarks which are always popular with visitors to the church itself. “We like to tell people, ‘This is what we can do for you, come and have a chat’. The market is still there, it’s just tapping into it.”
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