Digital press owners can now quickly expand into fast-growing consumer and business-to-business photo printing markets with new Kromekote True-Photo papers from SMART Papers. The ultra-glossy, recycled-content digital papers have a distinctive position in the global marketplace by combining the quality and feel of traditional photo paper with the printability of triple cast-coated Kromekote.

Kromekote True-Photo delivers outstanding photo and image reproduction, creating visuals that leap off the page. The 92-bright white shade produces intense colors and maximum image resolution. Businesses and consumers increasingly want the quality and feel of traditional photo paper when it comes to digital photography. The new archival and acid-free papers enable digital press owners to profitability meet the growing demand for custom shot-run photos and photo applications like greeting cards, direct mail, and personalized calendars.

The InfoTrends research group recently estimated that 19.7 billion photos will be digitally printed in 2008. SMART Papers is the only North American premium papermaker in the process of becoming 100% fossil-fuel, converting all of its energy production to 100% carbon-neutral waste wood biomass. Kromekote True-Photo has a mirror-smooth, triple cast-coated surface on one side for sharp photo reproduction on digital presses.

In just three weeks, three local Oregon commercial printing plants have announced that they are stopping their presses. With plants in Eugene and Forest Grove, 36-year-old Northwest Web; 101-year-old Koke Printing of Eugene; and Shorewood Packaging’s 13-year-old Springfield plant are all shutting their doors.

These combined closures will result in the loss of approximately 150 local jobs. It is a challenging time for roughly 40 local printers that are still producing everything from business cards to glossy six-color marketing brochures. Several local printers agree that they have not seen closures like what they’ve experienced. In the early 1980s, the area experienced a really bad economy, but there weren’t closures.

Koke Printing was founded in 1907 and was later merged with Industrial Printing, creating IP/Koke Printing in 1990. In the short term, the string of closures will channel more business to the surviving printers. QSL has recently picked up some former IP/Koke customers but it will take awhile for all of those accounts to find new homes. TechnaPrint Inc. in west Eugene has already seen an increase in business with orders on the rise. The local printers that survive will depend on how they respond to the current economic recession and adapting to underlying industry forces.

Faced with increasing costs of postage and maintaining circulation, Newsweek has been quietly contemplating a drop in its circulation of a million copies or more. Newsweek executives began discussing a rate base rollback as early as this summer.

Anonymous sources say that the magazine is considering slashing up to 1.6 million copies from Newsweek’s current rate base of 2.6 million, which would put the magazine’s rate base at one million. Aside from the cost of maintaining such a high circulation, Newsweek would like to be a “thought leader,” much like The Economist, which has a rate base in North America of 714,000. This kind of drop in circulation is not uncommon, particularly in the newsweekly category.

Time cut its rate base by 750,000 copies in January 2007. Newsweek followed by dropping 500,000 copies from its circulation in November 2007. However, a cut of this size is still risky as the public perception can make a magazine look weak in the eyes of readers and advertisers. The advertising bubble burst in 2008. Newsweek newsstand sales have also fallen to 83,000 from 147,000 in 2004. Time’s newsstand circulation has also fallen to 96,000, down from 103,000 four years ago.

Despite the economic recession, New York printing service Mimeo.com unveiled a new 80,000 square-foot printing and distribution facility near Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey. The $10 million facility is the second for the Manhattan tech company, which digitally prints marketing and collateral material for corporate clients placing orders via the web.

The new Newark facility will employ approximate 100 digital production workers. Mimeo currently has a 140,000 square-foot facility in Memphis, Tennessee. They selected the Newark location for its close proximity to clients and to a FedEx shipping hub, who handles the firm’s shipping needs. Mimeo may also open a third plant on the West Coast.

Mimeo has approximately 570 employees and more than 4,000 corporate clients including Delta Air Lines and Google Inc. The company is backed by high profile investors like Goldman Sachs Principal Strategies Group and Hewlett Packard. Mimeo also currently generates more than $50 million in revenue. The company has signed a 15-year lease at their new Newark location.

Finished used to be seen as the poor man of the printing process and was viewed as a faceless commodity. The sector has introduced new techniques and added value to the production of print. Finishing service providers are becoming increasingly important to the print process as finishing options become more and more advanced.

Standard finishing machines have moved in-house forcing finishing companies to turn to niche areas to survive, including lamination, die-cutting, miniature die-cutting, and spot UV. A good example of a finisher that has expanded its services in this way is Best Cover UV. They hold the honor of being the first United Kingdom firm to install a Heidelberg Speedmaster CD 102 configured purely as a coater. The company uses the machine to offer high-speed runs in UV coating, remoist gluing, fragrancing, scratch-offs, and opaques.

If the range of finishing options available is going to be utilized to their full potential, there needs to be a culture change among printers. A lot of printers are blind to specialist products with most more interested in getting large amounts of ink on large amounts of paper. There are a small number of printers that are forward-thinking with regards to finishing techniques.