It's Saturday, and I'm catching up on writing ahead of DRUPA, the media circus of which starts on Monday, a bank holiday in the UK where I currently am (writes Peter Coleman).
Hopefully the gxpress.net website is up-to-date as I succumb to the distractions of the day.
A thud at the front door delivers the Daily Telegraph, and I pause to count pages while Julie Miller croons on my iPad, considering that while things ain't what they used to be in the print media world, they're not dire.
Inside a main book of 38 broadsheet and sport section of 24 tabloid are three discreet units - two on newsprint, mostly broadsheet but totaling 308 tabloid page-equivalents, and a third polybagged to include the heatset Telegraph Magazine (92 pages), Ultratravel (76 tab) and Experience countryside (48 tab) advertising supplements plus commercial inserts. Taking the liberty of counting the super-A4 pages of the Magazine as tabloid, that's a total of 622 pages, not a bad contract for Rupert Murdoch's Newsprinters, the triple-wide manroland presses of which have produced two-thirds of the total, along with most of the other newspapers I've seen since I arrived here ahead of the INMA World Congress.
Telegraph Media Group is a showcase for innovation online, and it's clear that its success in matching audience to offers is replicated in print. The national daily also benefits hugely from its position as the local property paper for tens of thousands of aspiring homeowners (and upgraders) in the expensive London and Home Counties market.
Take that and stuff it up the 'extended runway' we were hearing about at the beginning of this week.
It's tempting to compare the 622 page Telegraph with the now-past better days of The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald in Australia, making allowances for smaller audiences in Oz but also for increased competition in the UK where the "nationals" still show their local metro local character... and seem to get the best of both worlds.
Another distraction at my sister's home has been a touch of nostalgia: She's trying to clear the detritus and loft accumulation from 44 years in one house - which has led to cracks in the ceiling of upstairs rooms - and is keen that I claim some old newspapers if I want them.
Bits of her past and my own is encapsulated in a copy (or ten) of the Sheerness Times-Guardian for Septembner 15, 1972 which contains a report of her wedding... and a chunk of my own life. It's not pretty: A tall broadsheet printed on a Victory-Kidder letterpress rotary my father had acquired from the Bristol Evening Post and rebuilt in Sheerness only a couple of years before he died, leaving my mother in charge and me still at school.
By 1972, I've four years back helping under my belt, and the pages are brighter for the for Scan-a-Graver halftones produced on a secondhand machine as an alternative to sending pictures by bus to a rival 20 miles away for engraving. Headlines are bigger too, thanks to a Nebitype caster - a sort of Ludlow for Italians - which was the last piece of machinery we were to put in before switching to phototypesetting and the first go out.
There is also the Faversham News, which I was given the opportunity of buying from the London publisher which had once owned the Sheerness one, but the acquisition of which I was (still painfully) too mature to manage. Days before contract completion editorial staff announced they weren't staying and most dispersed to newly-established rivals, resulting in the News becoming the best we could produce with our talented young team but still a tabloid lookalike for its new Sheerness stablemate... and dropping 1000 copies of its already tiny paid circulation in the process.
As always, we proved the stayers: The bag of yellowing papers also includes coverage of a party we held another six years later to celebrate the Faversham paper's centenary; that the granddaughters of the founders both of that paper and of the Times-Guardian - plus a slew of civic dignitaries - visited our print site in Sheerness is hopefully proof that we weren't the ogres the previous editor had led people to believe.
Fast forward five years to a supplement recording the installation a four-unit Rockwell-Goss Community, and a "world-first" four-colour production using Kodak's PMT chemical transfer plates. Things seem to move fast these days, but looking back to a period which had included scrapping the letterpress rotary, and two years of contract on a neighbour's Goss Urbanite while we reorganized composing facilities - including Compugraphic 4961s, an AKI paper-tape editing terminal and then a software-controlled Photo Econosetter - and the commissioning of the press, in a period in which I also managed to become engaged to my Australian sub-editor wife - suggest that we didn't hang about then either.
For most of the past 30 years - we did what we should perhaps have done earlier and sold the Sheerness and Faversham to a competitor - I have instead been a "fly on the wall", fascinated to observe the industry notionally from the outside.
INMA presentations - including those from the editors of the Liverpool Echo and London Evening Standard - and the launch and closure of Trinity Mirror within two months, and the sale of the compact daily i to Johnston Press for £24 million ($48.8 million) send conflicting messages about the future of printed newspapers.
In the Manila airport in March on my way home from Publish Asia, an editor from India - where the market is still print-positive - expressed the view that cover prices in western markets such as Australia and the UK are way too high.
At £2.00 (about $4.07 Australian) the Telegraph doesn't seem bad value for 622 pages, provided you want (and have time) to read what it offers... and it must be a better proposition for the publisher to take a cover price from willing readers rather than pay to have a kilogramme-and-a-half of dead trees delivered free.
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