Business Management - Industry Trends

At RIT, I took the “Printing Industry Trends” course with Frank Romano. On the first day of class, Frank casually mentioned our main assignment was to create a book. “Print 2022: Printing Changed the World - Now the World Is Changing Printing” is that book.

The Orange Country Register in suburban Los Angeles is expanding its newsroom. Not only that—the owners are emphasizing print, not digital. In the past few weeks, longtime Register editor Ken Brusic has hired some two-dozen positions. “We haven't seen this kind of hiring since the early ’90s,” he says.

At the Register’s headquarters, it sounds like a different era. The Register’s presses whir nearly 24 hours a day. They’re printing more color, more pages.

Brusic doesn’t think people stopped subscribing to newspapers because they didn’t want to read them. He thinks it’s because publishers made too many cutbacks.

There are several ways of looking at the impact of electronic technologies on print, including: the relative impact on page volumes within a specific application, the impact of print loss within a specific application, and the loss of page volumes in total compared to other applications.

Now in its 29th year, the Printing Impressions 400 provides the industry’s most comprehensive ranking of the leading printing companies in the United States and Canada. The listings include company name and headquarters location; parent company, if applicable; current and previous year’s rankings; most recent and previous year’s fiscal sales; percentage change; primary specialties; principal officer(s); as well as number of employees, manufacturing plants and total press units.

“Diary of a Wimpy Kid” author Jeff Kinney is a kid’s book star. And, in many ways, his success reflects the publishing industry’s shifting landscape. Twenty years ago, children’s book publishers sold mostly to librarians and teachers. A decade ago, though, state funding took a serious hit and publishers stepped up their marketing to kids and parents via bookstores, says Lin Oliver, executive director of the Society of Children’s Book Authors and Illustrators.

“Children’s publishing became more of a business with breakout hits,” Oliver says. Books with graphic elements...became especially popular. “They are not like book report books,” Oliver says.

There are some media channels, such as print, that seem so antiquated that marketers don’t think about how social media and technology can be influenced by the medium. Well, lets aim to make this a mindset of the past and start encouraging our coworkers, clients, leadership and partners to think “social,” even when producing print ads and printed collateral.

Printers have never been more eager to find new opportunities than they are now. Digital presses have made it possible to create a personalized book template that can be printed on a heavy stock that will stand up to the punishment a toddler can dish out.

When it comes to the magazine, Oprah Winfrey said her staff prepared her to expect a 25 percent decline in newsstand sales after the talk show ended. (It has been closer to 22 percent.) And while she acknowledged that she enjoys “holding the magazine in my hand,” she is pragmatic about print’s future and said she would stop publishing a print magazine if it were not profitable.

The median age for an O reader is 49, according to data tracked by GfK MRI. Ms. Winfrey said she would like to attract women “in their 30s or perhaps their 20s

As the printing industry slowly recovered from one of the most difficult business climates ever, Harald Weimer stepped into his new position as president of Heidelberg USA. It brings me great pleasure welcoming him to my blog to share his outlook on the U.S. printing industry,

Many readers in the mid-Atlantic region report a new appreciation for print media in the wake of Sandy’s mayhem. Among the observations they passed along are: Print works just fine when the power is out. Print’s battery doesn’t die. If you own a printed product, you don’t need a wifi connection to access it.