Dean Singleton Addressing Individuated Newspaper Conference
Today and tomorrow I’m in Washington, D.C., attending the third annual Individual Newspapers Conference. Although I’m a bit too busy at it to write anything reflective about it yet, here are some highlights:
- Dean Singleton, the founder and CEO of the MediaNews Group newspaper chain (55 dailies) and the chairman of the Associated Press opened the conference by video. His chain takes the concept of Individuation of editions very seriously.
- The Washington Times (this year’s host of the conference) has just finished an experiment producing individuated editions for dozens of households. Sixty percent of the households reported that their expectation were “exceeded or greatly exceeded.”
- Newspaper executives who are experimenting with individuation are having to realize that each individual reader’s edition might contain a different number of pages that another reader’s, depending upon the individual’s choices of news. No more producing the same edition for everyone, even the same number of pages for everyone.
- MediaNews Group will to using Printcasting’s technologies for targeted special sections in SF, LA, Denver, Bakersfield. Printcasting founder and online publishing veteran Dan Pacheco also noted that Printcasting’s advertising CPMs have been averaging $30 to $50 versus online ads’ average CPMs of less than $1.
- Duncan Newton of Oce citing Frank Romano of RIT: digital presses will soon dominate over offset lithographic presses.
- Duncan Newton cited his comany’s latest digital press is capable of producting sixty 48-page tabloid-format individuated newspapers in two minutes. I asked him if that speed will soon increase, because if the average daily newspaper in the U.S. has 20,000 circulation, that digital press would take 11 hours to print those copies. Newton replied that he doesn’t foresee much increase in speed anytime soon. His company can make the presses wider, which might double their edition output, but the real factor limiting digital press speed is computer horsepower. To produce each copy different from every other copy, according to each individual subscriber’s choices of news, and do so at a 300 dot-per-inch resolution, requires phenomenal processing power. His company’s top-of-the-line digital press currently requires eight quad-processor CPUs to run it.
- MediaNews Group’s Peter Vandevanter says his company has 150K subscriptions to ‘personalized’ e-editions; the Washington Times has 10K.
- Gregor Dorsch of Syntops showing an individuated newspaper combining content from the Washington Post, The Washington Times, Die Welt, Der Standard, and Berliner Morgenpost. “Nobody in Switzerland is going to purchase an entire copy of The Washington Post, but individuated publishing allows them to read that paper’s top stories in any Swiss daily.”
- Starting October 1, PersonalNews in Switzerland, a Syntops print product, will sell individuated editions for €25 for 25 daily editions (six days a week). Each edition can contain the consumer’s choice of up to 10 sections of news.