This one is starting to leave the station

-- Graphic Arts Online, 11/3/2008 8:52:00 AM Newsworld Corp. selected an AlphaGraphics franchise to print U.S. copies of the U.K.’s Daily Mail and Mail On Sunday. The publisher will buy a Screen Truepress Jet520 on-demand newsprint solution with a dedicated Standard Hunkeler finishing system to be installed at Dayton, NJ-based printer. AlphaGraphics parent company Pindar is based in the U.K.

Today at Idea Lab -Community News for the Digital Age

We experienced this first hand in Bakersfield with Bakotopia, a social networking site I started for the Californian in 2005. Despite high traffic and audience engagement, it wasn't embraced by advertisers. But in 2007, we created a print magazine that carried the same content as the Web site (sort of a "Best of the Blogs" index).

In that year, Bakotopia more than doubled its number of advertisers, with 78% of them unique -- meaning they were new and not just carryovers from.
. . .
There's a great lesson in there that you won't see reflected in any punditry-filled story about the supposed "death" of newspapers. Most people aren't unsubscribing from newspapers because they're printed, but because the content isn't as relevant to their unique interests as what they read online.

From Seybold on line. (this is a MUST read)

The ad is a nod toward what is possible and what industry suppliers such as Hewlett Packard, Kodak and Océ are preparing for.

Notice who is missing from the list of HP, Kodak, and Oce. Not only Xerox, but Screen. This is an oversight that will be shortly corrected. While all I know is what I read on line and some Print, it looks to me that Kodak is going to have a fight on it's hands, not with HP or Oce, but with the Screen Truepress Jet520. Is it better quality, I don't know. Is it good enough? Given that Newsworld put down the cash and installed at AlphaGraphics, I'm betting it is fine.

Notice that AlphaGraphics now has UK ownership. Donnelly sold them and later bought some big BPO outfit, also based in the UK.

So where does that leave Xerox? From everything I can see it seems we are not going to get on the customized newspaper train. I could be wrong, but from what I've read, that's what it looks like to me.

Here's my two cents to people who have to get this done.

MPS owns the education and government markets . . .for now. We are making great inroads into SMB with Global Imaging and the new boxes in the last couple of years. We have a pretty large installed base of Igens and less around the world. We have to get them working in sync.

There is a window of opportunity that may close rapidly. Ricoh has joined forces with IBM. I'm thinking they are going to be pretty serious in enterprise solutions. Ricoh has the boxes, IBM has the cred. For other combos, check out Print4Pay.com. He seems to keep on top of that part of the industry.

A global information infrastructure with print output is not just another nice or silly (depending on your point of view) idea. If it's wrong, someone should say so. If it's right, we better get on the stick.