Details – albeit unofficial – are emerging of what could be the blueprint for newspaper printing in Australia’s metro and regional centres (writes Peter Coleman).
Obscured by the ethical and professional issues of plans to outsource more of the sub-editing work on its ‘Age’ and ‘Sydney Morning Herald’, has been the mathematical reality that Fairfax Media has real production cuts up its sleeve.
Today’s issue of the ‘Australian’ does that math, concluding that if 100 of the 250 planned printing and production jobs to be shed are in New Zealand, the balance must be in Australia, “including from its regional prepress and national printing, distribution and advertising operations”.
And it quotes unofficial sources from within its own publisher, News Limited that restructuring editions with the loss of 21 jobs in its Chullora, Sydney plant “would free up two presses” delivering enough capacity to print Fairfax’s daily and Sunday titles.
The report suggests talks about contract printing are not sufficiently advanced to have influenced the proposed job cuts… but whether or not this is true, they clearly put News in a position of strength in the negotiations.
News’ recently-upgraded plant at Chullora has continued to surprise with its quality and productivity. New all-colour manroland Geoman tower presses were installed in place of the Newsman presses installed there as part of a huge 1987 order. New faster and more-flexible Ferag mailroom equipment was also installed in a spacious mezzanine crated alongside the new presses.
Originally, the idea was to have dedicated plant for News’ Cumberland suburban newspaper series, but productivity and flexibility of the modern double-width presses – and a constructive approach to manning flexibility – has already made it possible to embrace this work with that of the metro titles on fewer presses, freeing one of the five-tower (160-pages tabloid) Geoman lines ordered for Chullora for an upgrade in Townsville, Queensland, which went live last November.
While the Colorman presses and buffered Müller Martini mailroom at Fairfax’s Chullora plant has also been upgraded – notably with extra towers and print couples to provide extra colour – it is relatively inflexible and among the oldest equipment in the two metro centres.
These presses were an obstacle to former Fairfax chief executive David Kirk’s announced plan to reduce th page-widths of its broadsheet titles.
When he was in Sydney for the PrintEx11 trade show, I quizzed manroland web sales vice president Peter Kuisle on possible avenues for the production cooperation he had advocated at an earlier Australian trade show: Could new automated triple-wide presses – similar to those on which News in the UK prints its own and contract work including the rival ‘Daily Telegraph’ – cost-effectively handle the work of both publishers?
He made two points:
• triple-wide equipment wouldn’t be needed unless the section structuring of the papers to be printed requires it;
• top-level press automation justifies itself when there are a number of edition changes to be made.
The message here may be that News already owns equipment in Sydney sufficiently flexible and productive to meet its own needs be able to print Fairfax’s time-sensitive metro mastheads, at least with relatively modest changes.
An agreement might provide for Fairfax trucking in some sections and supplements from its hybrid heatset-coldset printing plant in North Richmond or the under-utilised Canberra plant, which already prints ‘Sunday Life’ supplements for the Sunday ‘Sun-Herald’, and could potentially print copies of the ‘Australian’ and the ‘Telegraph’ for the federal capital?
There are a number of potential savings, not only in terms of the saved overhead of one plant an better utilisation of the others, but also through the potential for shared distribution. And there might (or might not) be a place for the displaced Sydney equipment in the less-sophisticated New Zealand market, where presses are generally old, colour capacity more limited and there is potential for shared printing is with APN.
So much for Sydney. The situation in Melbourne is more complicated: News equipment there is older, and the demands of its tabloid ‘Herald-Sun’ greater – despite a recent fall in circulation of almost five per cent – may call for a different solution… but let’s see whether this one works, first.
And there’s the rub: Not whether Fairfax could outsource its printing to News, but whether it should. A cultural divide leaves little love or respect between the two, but even if this could be overcome, the lack of own metro plants could leave Fairfax significantly weakened.
Perhaps – as we suggested in the case of the outsourced subbing proposals – it would be better if Fairfax were to tackle the industrial restrictions which make inhouse subbing and production less attractive than outsourcing. It might take (as advertising guru Todd Sampson put it during a PrintEx11 forum address) a few more minutes of bravery.
Smaller products from the loss of classified advertising and those generally falling circulations are the now-unavoidable ‘elephant in the room’: Australia’s newspapers have fared better than those in most developed markets around the world (and much better than those in the US), but are not immune from the effects of competition from online publishers.
Audit figures published last week show the trend:
National dailies (Jan-Mar 2011 compared to 2010)–
The Australian, Mon-Fri down 2.0% to 129,985; Sat down 3.9% to 292,649.
Australian Financial Review, Mon-Fri down 3.8% to 72,734; Sat down 14.6% to 78,312.
Metropolitan dailies
Canberra
Canberra Times, Mon-Fri down 4.0% to 31,521; Sat down 4.7% to 53,561.
Sydney
Daily Telegraph, Mon-Fri down 2.4% to 341,262; Sat down 0.8% to 324,760.
Sydney Morning Herald, Mon-Fri up 0.2% to 209,500+; Sat stable at 340,127.
Melbourne
The Age, Mon-Fri ip 0.6% to 190,600+; Sat down 1.8% to 275,000+.
Herald-Sun, Mon-Fri down 4.9% to 484,000+; Sat down 4.0% to 489,000+.
Brisbane
Courier Mail, Mon-Fri down 6.1% to 195,490; Sat down 7.5% to 278,313.
Adelaide
Advertiser, Mon-Fri down 2.5% to 176,517; Sat down 4.1% to 242,341.
Perth
West Australian, Mon-Fri down 3.6% to 184,365; Sat down 5.8% to 312,978.
Hobart
Mercury, Mon-Fri down 4.3% to 44,317; Sat down 2.8% to 61,020.
Darwin
Northern Territory News, Mon-Fri down 5.6% to 18,846; Sat down 4.4% to 29,315.
Regional titles have tended to fare better than the metros, but major players Fairfax and APN have both suffered as a result of extreme weather and poor retail conditions, the latter disclosing plant closures in Mackay and Bundaberg as part of strategic plans.
More of what is in store for Fairfax regional sites – most of them part of the former Rural Press – is suggested in today’s ‘Australian’ report. It lists “centres such as Orange, Goulburn, Bendigo and Warrnambool” as likely to have prepress (advertisement setting) departments closed, with the work consolidated in “towns including Wagga Wagga”. Seven FTE positions in Orange and four in Goulburn are to go, it says.
Even these figures make little impact on the 150 jobs mentioned above.
As it happens, I was in Goulburn last night, and the ‘Goulburn Post’ – which still carries the imprint of ‘Regional Publishers, a division of Rural Press Limited’ – is nothing to write home about.
Compared to the APN regionals I’m accustomed to in Queensland, it’s poorly designed, grey, and frankly… dull. A product, perhaps, of the effective monopoly Fairfax has in many towns ‘out in the sticks’. Bright, creative minds in a well-managed regional hub could well yield better-looking advertisements, more attractive pages, and headlines that fit.
Yes, it’s tough for the people whose jobs will be lost, but in many cases those displaced will be happy enough to take the redundancy offered. What may be more important is that newspapers in regional as in metropolitan centres stay relevant and cost-effective media for readers and advertisers.
