NewPage Corp.

The day before Mother’s Day, 88 Boy Scouts earned their Graphic Arts and Pulp and Paper merit badges at the International Printing Museum. Thanks to the help of more than 30 museum and industry volunteers, including representatives from BurdgeCooper, Mohawk Paper and the Printing Industries Association of Southern California (PIASC), the boys made paper, silk screened T-shirts and printed their mom a Mother’s Day card that they designed themselves.

Paper manufacturers 
have adopted several strategies to optimize coated and uncoated stocks for running on the emerging array of high-speed, 
continuous-feed, color inkjet presses. While some papers may need to be fine-tuned to run on individual brands of presses, an additional surface treatment may also be required with certain paper/press combinations, especially coated stocks.

Recent talks between Apollo Management and Cerberus, which owns NewPage, about the papermaker’s debt were characterized in some media outlets as merger talks. Apollo has bought up a majority of a NewPage debt issue, giving it significant leverage over the largest maker of coated and supercalendered papers in the United States.

“There are reports that Verso and NewPage have discussed combining is some way. I would be very surprised if this happened anytime soon,” Verle Sutton wrote in the February issue of The Reel Time Report (available only through subscription from Forestweb), published yesterday.

With contracts received to date, the Solutions Showcase exhibit hall is already 13 percent larger than last year. The show floor will be segmented by solutions related to commercial print, direct marketing, label and packaging, photo, publishing and grand-format printing.

NewPage’s owner, Cerberus, and Apollo Management, which has a controlling interest in #2 maker Verso Paper, are discussing what to do about NewPage’s high levels of debt, PPI Pulp & Paper Week reported recently. Apollo is also the largest holder of #1 NewPage’s $800 million second-lien bonds, the publication said.

Apollo’s apparent “loan to own” intentions for NewPage came to light early last year when it and two other hedge funds snapped up more than 50 precent of the second-lien bonds, apparently under the assumption that NewPage’s inability to make debt payments would eventually give them control

The Whiting mill currently operates two paper machines, which produce approximately 250,000 tons annually of coated paper used by the publishing and printing industry, with a focus on magazine and retailer markets.

Commercial printing industry supplier company and personnel news from Printing Impressions’ January 2011 edition, highlighting Innovationdays 2011.

MIAMISBURG, OH—NewPage Corp. has reportedly decided not to implement a $20-$50/ton price increase for coated and uncoated papers. The increase, announced in late November, would have taken effect in January.

NewPage Corp. has dropped a $20-$50/ton January price hike that it previously announced for a range of coated and uncoated paper products at the end of November, according to RISI. “When no other paper manufacturer joined NewPage in the increase, it was destined to fail,” a source tells FOLIO. “This bears out that the current paper market is experiencing softness.”

In the October issue of Folio: Magazine, Dan Walsh, vice president of publication papers for Bradner Smith & Co., predicted paper prices falling in the first part of 2011, but rebounding in the second half.

MIAMISBURG, OH—NewPage Corp. announced that it will close its Whiting, WI, mill at the end of February 2011. Approximately 360 employees will be affected by the shutdown.