Production teams are finding themselves at the crossroads between established and emerging technologies, all of which are presenting their own challenges.
“There’s been enormous change in the past few years”, says Richard Hill, media production director at IPC. “You don’t notice it when you’re involved in it, but when you look back, you realise just how much it has changed.”
“When the web side of the business first kicked off, that was dealt with as a separate entity; we didn’t have the skill sets to be involved in that. Now it’s more natural for teams to work across both.” They coordinate PDFs and have more transparent workflows now, with clear indicators of where work is at any given time – vital with the tighter deadlines demanded by going into competition with instant media as well as other print titles.
The developments have created more choice for publishers about the partners they work with. In the old days, they were hugely reliant on a limited number of printers and repro houses, who decided what the prevailing technology was going to be. Printers needed publishers and vice versa. Now, Hill says, publishers don’t need printers to quite the same extent. Coordinating a far greater number of publishing and delivery channels is far more complex, however. The challenge is that digital isn’t yet delivering big revenues for most publishers, and while the advent of the iPad and mobile phone reading makes delivering issues a simpler process, print volumes in many cases are decreasing, and energy costs are on the up. And, the time pressures have intensified because there’s no longer one fixed and finalised printed product every deadline, but a whole slew of multi-media offerings that are being constantly revised and updated. “All that content has to be in the right place at the right time,” says Hill.
The fast-moving nature of the digital side of the business is having a big impact on the decisions being made about investment in technology and business partnerships; what’s state of the art today could well be obsolete within a few months. “A lot of companies have sat on the fence about saying ‘this is the route we’re going’, because no one’s really sure”, he says. “Gone are the days when we tended to invest in bespoke systems that would only do one thing, because everything’s changing. It’s Facebook today; it could be somebody else tomorrow. You have to keep your options open; there’s constant investment, change and updating.”
At the Economist, the production team is using PowerSwitch software, which production project development specialist Robert Banbury says allows them to build workflows ranging in scale from simple move-and-copy operations, to complex pre-flighting, reformatting and delivery processes. Key to decision making in production now, given the speed of change, is the ability to adapt and link new processes to existing systems. “We have built automated workflows that have replaced older, more manual systems, resulting in improved resilience, fewer errors and greater efficiency”, says Banbury. “But, beyond that, we have been able to create new processes as demands change, extending the range of tasks that are undertaken and supporting more users.”
Business titles tend to have their production departments working far more closely with advertising for a magazine brand across multiple media. “If they’re chasing copy, they would chase copy for the brand”, says Gary Charlton, head of production at Haymarket Media Group. On the consumer side of the business, the ad ops team is very separate.
Shrinking print sector
While they’ve been evolving to keep pace with the digital world and all its possibilities, production chiefs have had to keep their feet firmly on the ground – and their focus on the presses. Uncertainty about the state of the web offset sector in the UK is causing some major headaches. Less than a year ago, Polestar was teetering on the brink of collapse, just before its sale to US private equity firm Sun Capital. Since the new year, capacity cuts industry-wide that had been coming for some time have intensified, with the three biggest companies in the sector announcing redundancies and pay cuts, and the trouble is not over yet.
Polestar is planning to close its operations in Colchester, which employs over 300 people, while Wyndeham Group is making cutbacks, and BGP has asked staff to vote on a pay cut.
Charlton says the input costs for web offset have risen massively in the past couple of years, and because most suppliers haven’t been in a strong position for some time, they haven’t been making the investments in kit that in better times they probably would have done. The hope is, he says, that after the current turmoil, will come a period of some stability.
Pressure on the industry and the resulting consolidation has not been confined to these shores. In the US, the number of businesses in the printing industry has shrunk by more than a quarter between 1998 and the end of last year, according to the National Association for Printing Leadership in a recent report on the state of the industry. The NAPL’s senior vice-president and chief economist has said the recession has only been one of several factors in the consolidation of the sector. “Clearly, the recession accelerated consolidation, but we were consolidating long before the steep downturn, and we will continue to consolidate even after recovery more firmly takes hold. Why? Because structural change is redefining our industry”, said Andrew Paparozzi. “Recessions that have hit us much harder than the economy at large (are) one reason, but not the only reason, or even the main reason. The real culprit behind the widening gap is structural change, led by the internet and digitisation. Of course, the economy is still very important, as the last three years have reminded us, but print’s relationship to the economy is not what it once was. It’s not just about the economy anymore.”
Other pressing matters
Ensuring publishers’ various products are delivered in the right form and on time is only part of the story for production teams now, though. They also have to do their bit to safeguard the environment. Since 2005, publishers, working through the PPA, have had an agreement with Defra, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, to increase the level of magazine recycling being undertaken by consumers. In the original agreement, publishers pledged to reach a 50 per cent recycling rate by the close of 2007, 60 per cent by the end of 2010, and 70 per cent by the end of 2013. Those rates have been reached and surpassed well ahead of schedule; the 2013 target was reached in 2008 and has climbed since. A logo on magazines encourages readers to think about recycling when they’ve finished reading. In addition, all unsold magazines are recycled.
While the debate in the industry just a couple of years ago was about recycling, that’s now pretty much taken as a given; broader environmental concerns are now being addressed. A PPA Carbon Calculator is being developed, due for launch by the end of this year, which will allow publishers to measure the carbon emissions caused by the production of their content and the forms in which they publish. Designed as a tool to show the value of more environmentally friendly business decisions, it will allow publishers to see, for instance, what difference they could make by changing the weight of the paper they use, or making other adjustments to production.
The PPA’s environment committee, comprised largely of production directors, is investing in ways of understanding the carbon footprint of electronic media, something that has been little explored, and for which there is next to no data available, not just in the UK but globally.
Digital is, curiously, not necessarily a less carbon-heavy option than the printed word. Not when the environmental impact of the computers and mobile devices on which they’re read or used are taken into account, along with the energy they consume, the fact that hard copies tend to be passed around but digital copies read by a single user, the journalism that’s involved is the same whichever way a title is consumed, and the fact that some digital consumers will print out the product anyway.
Haymarket’s Gary Charlton says that ensuring publishers’ suppliers are all conforming to the highest possible standards of environmental responsibility is fairly easy when it’s a question of dealing with three or four print suppliers who are well aware of what’s required. Making sure all the peripheral suppliers are ISO certified is more difficult, but it is getting simpler, as more suppliers understand what the industry is demanding.
Just the person for the job
The fast-evolving nature of the role of production within a publishing house means it takes a rather different person to thrive there than it did only a few years ago. Project management skills, commercial acumen and technical understanding have always been par for the course, but there’s a difference in attitude that’s now essential – a willingness to learn new things all the time and embrace change.
At UBM, content delivery runs from publishing magazines to digital editions, websites and webinars, as well as live events. “Production staff will need to be multi-tasking across the mediums in a few years’ time”, says publisher Doreen Loughrey. “All of us need to make sure they’re up to date with the latest technology so they’re able to move, to really adapt.”
“My view is that production personnel will become operational personnel, encompassing all aspects in the future as the printed requirement becomes part of the wider offering to our audience”, she says. “The difficulty it imposes is the time restrictions of schedules in that the printed magazine has to go to press at a certain time and the digital requirements need to fit around these, which is a challenge in itself. But regardless of these obstacles, we do need a versatile team that are proficient in all aspects and this takes investment of both time and money to ensure each individual is trained for the future.”
