What if, instead of slashing unprofitable circulation and contemplating cutting it back altogether, making printed newspapers available was an obligation?

Logically you’d look for ways to make a virtue of a necessity and exploit costly distribution networks, perhaps taking advantage of technologies such as digital newspaper printing.

Which is exactly what Hubert Péderand is doing in France, one of several European countries where temporary government subsidies support the national delivery of printed daily newspapers.

Péderand – who owns a digitally-printed newspaper business himself in Réunion, a French island in the Indian Ocean – is on a mission: Back in Paris to advise the government through the Union Nationale d’Imprimeries et de le Communication (UNIC) he has identified 141 distribution pressure points where he believes daily newspapers would be better served by digital printing.

And while the government’s 15 million Euros ($22.5 million) industry reorganisation support lasts, he is keen to encourage publishers and printers to take advantage of digital print technology developments to help themselves before it is too late.

In the process, an opportunity exists to create businesses which “can’t be Googled or Amazoned” and link Gutenberg to Zuckerberg, he says, with some of the $59 billion Google took in 2013 in his targets. Using paper as “a true content portal”, strategically-placed digital print sites would produce daily editions with content localised geographically and to match a reader’s specific interests.

“With digital print, you can sell the same space more than once, more than recouping extra the 36 per cent it costs over offset,” he says. “The return on marketing investment (ROMI), the selling value is much higher than the increased costs. You need to stop focussing on cutting cost and think about added value per page for advertisers.

“And you can use the equipment to create amazing new digital products such as catalogues, inserts, coupons and manuals.”

This is very much what Péderand, a speaker at last month’s Publish Asia conference, has been doing in Réunion for the last five years.

The remote island in the Indian Ocean – east of Madagascar and 9500 km from Paris – is one of five ‘overseas departments’ of France (the others are French Guiana in South America, Guadeloupe and Martinique in the Caribbean, and Mayotte, also in the Indian Ocean) and subject to similar treatment as mainland regions.

One benefit comes from the country’s media subsidies, which help residents keep up with daily news from national newspapers such as Le Monde, Le Figaro and sports title L’Equipe which are printed on the island on their day of publication on a Kodak VL4200 inkjet web along with local newspapers.

But Péderand – a joint manager and director of RotOcéan, a digital print partnership which includes island publisher Temoignages and local printer Graphica – is exploiting the technology to do much more. RotOcéan prints a variety of variable data direct mail and newspaper insert products on the 128 metres-a-minute Kodak press which has Datamatrix coding and correction capabilities.

“Not everything has to be done on edition, so frequently we print sophisticated targetted products in advance for inclusion in the newspaper,” he says.

Returned with his family to Paris to drive the Inigraph change project for the French government – but still sharing management of RotOcéan – he is convinced the same lessons can be applied to advantage in mainland France.

With post-DRUPA developments in digital printing, he puts the marginal cost threshold for a 48-page tabloid at about 4000 copies against a two-around single-width press. An HP T400 with 1066 mm web width printing at 250 metres/minute will produce 16-page tabloids at 17,700 cph (or a 48-page tab at 5903 cph) he says.

Given the French government’s funding, he’s also keen to push the country’s competence in dot-on-demand inkjet, expressed through Impika, which is now part of Xerox.

He cites the successes of digital book printer Rotolito Lombardo, and Screen user Atlas Printing which prints same-day newspaper editions in Dubai, but stresses that the needed change will involve a new publishing model, rather than mere press technology.

For newspapers, “the keyword is distribution,” he says, and leveraging what he calls “the power of local” through developments in the use of digital algorithms, some of which are available as plug-ins for Adobe’s InDesign layout application.

“Digital print converts static pages into dynamic pages,” he says.

Taking the concept ‘on tour’ through France over the last couple of years with a detailed list of geographic pressure points, he has found ready support from distributors – many of which have been involved for years in some form of variable data through addressing – but rather less from publishers, for whom the scheme is intended. “They either don’t understand, they’re too old, or there are problems with unions, strikes and banks that don’t like printers.

“The industry is shrinking, so it is important to tell people that this could be a new industry, a starting point.”

But despite all indications – national newspapers and weekly news magazine circulations in France are falling by 11-12 per cent a year – selling the idea is still a struggle. Péderand says a French revolution is in progress, “but publishers need to eat more dust before it will happen”.

And in the Asia-Pacific? “You can’t compare France with Asia, India and China,” he says, “but we could be ahead of what is to come.”