One is that newspaper publishers are looking for ways to turn the production plant into a profit centre. There are a variety of business models that can lead printers in this direction.
Secondly, the newspaper product itself is changing. In the past newspapers – as the first mass medium in history – had to be produced in the fastest, simplest and most affordable way. But already in the 90s of the last century full-colour printing was introduced into newspaper production, which broke those old rules and enabled newspapers to compete with magazines and electronic media. Now we observe a new trend towards increasing newspaper production quality again by using higher quality materials and upgrading the production process as well.
The Advisory Council Chairman and IFRA CEO have reviewed the various suggestions from IFRA’s Regional Committees and its Technical Groups and approved the below topic for 2008: Economics of Semi-Commercial Printing, commercial opportunities, what problems to watch for?
More and more publishers are investigating ways to utilise (and monetise) the full capacity of their presses. Naturally, this involves the right technologies and with semi-commercial, there are a number of options. But the overall business strategy should be considered first.
The technical limitations of semi-commercial print production are defined by combining the requirements of fast, straightforward and multi-web based newspaper production with the requirements of high-quality heatset production. This combination leads to a technical compromise, which allows producing a quality level that is appropriate for many print jobs in the area of commercial flyers, inserts, supplements, directories and magazines.
On the other hand the quality of semi-commercial will be below the level of commercial single-web heatset production, which allows a horizontal web-lead through printing units and dryer without any contact with guide rollers or turner bars.
The definition of this new semi-commercial print quality was the target of the IFRA Standardisation Working Group Semi- Commercial Printing and is presented in this document to the public.