Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Data + Blabla Point: Can Commercial Printing Save Dailies? and Money keeps prowling around

The answer is no. Newspapers have to save themselves. But commercial printers can start making money as soon as the blabla stops and the newspaper Board of Directors stop being busy being busy and focus on the task at hand.

Money is on the prowl.
DFW Capital came in last July. see snippet below. They see that "The End of Print" is merely the blablabla du jour. Sounds like grown ups to me.

Meanwhile the institutional investors (hedge funds in portfolio manager clothing) think Xerox makes office equipment and Kodak is a consumer goods company. And the "analysts" are mostly too busy being busy to focus on very much in the first place. Sorry Wall Street, after the last 6 months I find it very hard to take seriously anything you might have to say.

Watching the money, on the other hand, is very, very interesting. I can't wait until money sees the opportunity to replace K -12 textbooks with versioned newspapers. Clearly there is going to be lots of excess capacity for all those offset web presses.
Can Commercial Printing Save Dailies? -
5/6/2009 6:11:00 AM - Graphic Arts Online:
Web offset printers are making big bets that they can save newspapers and profit. Add AFL Web to the list of web offset printing firms, including Southwest Offset and Transcontinental Printing, aggressively moving into newspaper production.
. . .
(AFL is a )35-year-old family-owned firm already printing five daily newspapers from its two plants–totaling 265,000-sq.ft.–including The Financial Times, Women's Wear Daily and Metro's New York and Philadelphia editions. And more papers are in the pipeline. In January, the 350-employe ecompany added two Muller Martini inserting systems.
. . .
Some of the funding for the new equipment came from DFW Capital Partners, Teaneck, NJ, which acquired a controlling interest in AFL last July.

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