How print automation will free legacy news publishers to focus on the future

Whatever happened to the digital tipping point?

Way back in 2010, news publishers started talking about the ‘digital tipping point’, that moment when online revenue would surpass print revenue, as newspapers inevitably disappeared from their portfolios.

The phrase became an annual report cliche through the 2010s as first tablets, then smartphones, then metered paywalls became the cornerstones of the media landscape.

But fast forward to right now and printed newspapers are, interestingly, still here and for many ‘legacy’ news publishers print still dominates revenue.

The European company Mediahuis, which operates in Germany, Ireland, Belgium etc, has set a goal of generating 70 per cent of its revenue from digital by . . . 2030.

And when the CEO announced this, in 2024, it was the other way round - print still made up 70 per cent of their income. And they are definitely not alone.

The inconvenient truth is that print readers, although declining massively in overall numbers, are typically older, wealthier and still more willing to pay for news.

So that’s why there are still somewhere between 10-20,000 printed newspapers in Europe (the numbers are difficult to pin down because they editionalise, they come and go and some publish irregularly).

In Germany, for example, there are more than 300 daily regional print titles, and in the UK the number of dailies and weeklies still in print is more than 1,000.

Further afield, the Asia-Pacific region has something like 35,000 different printed newspapers still rolling off the presses. India alone has tens of thousands of titles printed in dozens of regional languages.

Japan, China, Indonesia, Malaysia and many others retain really strong print cultures.

Publishers all over the world know this won’t last forever but they are saddled with a conundrum - how do you still keep producing print but drastically reduce the costs of creating it?

Beyond the ‘newsroom of the future’

A lot of the cost of creating newspapers is in human labour; the time-honoured expertise of production journalists processing and presenting editorial content.

Templating, layout-before-text systems and many other advancements in the 2010s removed much of the manual repetition of newspaper production, but skilled people were still needed to pull print titles together.

A repeated cycle of transformational restructures (usually called something like ‘newsroom of the future’) saw media companies attempting to focus newsrooms on purely digital outputs, with audio and video now a much bigger part of the mix.

Print remained the spectre at the feast, a largely profitable but unwelcome distraction from the content creation process.

This is where print automation comes in.

Push the button - out comes a newspaper

Last year at National World in the UK (now called Iconic Media) I oversaw the introduction of print automation to 75 of our weekly newspapers, bringing in new workflows and organisational structures.

We took the production task of creating a weekly print title, which would previously take several people one week, down to around 30-45 minutes.

We formed a small centralised ‘page automation unit’ of five people to handle the pages and worked extremely closely with software providers to commission and create a process that suited a large print portfolio publishing many thousands of individual print pages every week.

The labour was previously the work of somewhere between 50-60 people, who were repurposed back into the organisation.

Here’s how it worked:

• Content is created across the weekly news cycle and published online. It is not written to pre-defined lengths, as was the case when print templates ruled the process.

• A local news editor selects which stories should appear in the print edition in the form of a print list.

• Some content is marked with a particular priority for, say, page 3 or page 5, and some content is listed by section (eg sport rather than news).

• The central team runs the content (words and pictures) through the automation process which places it on pages, around the adverts - an entire print book of, say, 48-72 pages, in around 10 minutes.

• The local editor then performs a final check and the pages are bulk exported to the press site.

There are broadly two types of print automation system being developed right now:

• A ‘rules-based’ approach which takes existing print templates and then adapts them, stretching boxes and changing typographies within defined parameters to accommodate different lengths of content and photo aspects.

• An AI-platform-driven process which draws pages from scratch, based on typographical rules determined by the publication, learning iteratively about presentation.

We tried both of these - and both have their merits - before settling on the former, but software providers are picking up the pace now and systems are rapidly improving all round.

The one concession for content creators was to write a separate headline for print (as opposed to a search optimised one). But developers are now looking at AI-based headline generators which will create the right words to fit the box.

But you still need some talented key people . . .

If you are a publisher with legacy newspaper products, this has to be something to consider now, so here’s a couple of things I learned:

• You need a brilliantly talented template designer who can work with the software provider to interpret and replicate the designs of your titles.

• You also need an automation team manager who has an exceptionally rigorous grasp of multiple press deadlines (getting 75 papers to press each week with a handful of people in your team is . . . mentally challenging).

Luckily, we had both of these people.

Also, there’s still a place for quality bespoke print design, but it should be the preserve of talented designers in a central team who work on front pages, graphics or interesting presentations, not fiddling Indesign boxes around a page to make a story fit.

In this piece I have focussed on processes and not mentioned quality, but trust me, it doesn’t suffer.

The last word on this - or should I say lack of words - goes to the thousands of our discriminating print readers.

Not a single one of them has ever complained about the presentation or appearance of our newspapers as a result of the change to page automation. A silence that speaks volumes.

Tim Robinson is a newsroom consultant and member of the Fathm expert network, who has delivered editorial training and mentoring around the world. He was previously a longstanding senior editorial leader at the UK regional publisher National World plc.