Nevada Press Association The best in Nevada journalism since 1924
By Teri Saylor for the Nevada Press Association and the National Newspaper Association
Despite having to find a new printer for his newspapers on short notice, Kirk Kern (photo below) considers himself lucky.
Last July, Kern, the chief operating officer of Battle Born Media in Boulder City, Nevada received a 30-day notice that the Salt Lake Tribune in Salt Lake City was cutting back its printing services. The Tribune had been printing Battle Born’s six newspapers for a number of years. Battle Born’s other two newspapers are printed by Swift Communications in Carson City.
“The Salt Lake Tribune served all our needs with full-color capability, fast turnaround, reasonable prices and great customer service,” Kern said. While the distance from Salt Lake City to Battle Born’s newspapers in central Nevada seems daunting, the Tribune was able to deliver the printed newspapers to Battle Born’s Ely Times, about 240 miles in a manageable drive time of three-and-a-half hours on Highway 15.
Luckily, when Kern got the bad news, he already had two printing options on the table.
“One of the printers would have required us to change our deadline by a day, delaying our normal Thursday publication day until Friday,” he said. The other offer came from the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the Ely Times’ previous publisher under different ownership.
The Review-Journal, which had been courting Kern’s business for a month, won the contract. Delivery to Ely is the same distance as it was from Salt Lake City, but the route, along a two-lane road, takes about an hour longer.
The transition was not without challenges. With a different press comes a different web width. But Battle Born had purchased the four newspapers from the Review-Journal more than a decade ago, and familiarity with the product helped smooth the transition.
“We had to change our page size, column width and ad sizes, but it wasn’t really a problem,” Kern said. Another Nevada newspaper, the High Desert Advocate in West Wendover, which also printed in Salt Lake City, transferred its printing to the Review-Journal as well and is piggybacking its delivery with the Battle Born papers to Ely.
“It turned out to be a win-win situation for all of us,” Kern said.
Small newspapers have long outsourced their printing to larger newspapers in their regions for savings, convenience, and because they didn’t have the physical space or page count, circulation and frequency to keep a press busy. Now, some are starting to suffer hardships that come with media consolidation and cutbacks according to Tony Smithson, regional director of printing operations for Adams Publishing Group of southern Wisconsin. Smithson, who writes a regular column about printing issues for the National Newspaper Association’s monthly Publishers Auxiliary, said the search for greater efficiency is driving larger newspapers to consolidate many of their operations, including printing. This puts extra pressure on press capacities, and smaller newspapers are starting to feel the pinch.
“Eventually presses age, and it’s getting harder to find anyone to run them or repair them when they break down,” he said. Press shutdowns put added pressure on regional printing capacities.
APG keeps its production facility in Wisconsin busy, printing 120 newspapers, including its own publications..
Keeping presses running will be an ongoing challenge, Smithson said, due to the shrinking print product as the media industry moves toward digital publishing.
“It is a reality that circulation is declining. We print 10 percent more newspapers today than in the past, but we print the same number of copies,” he said.
In Kansas, existing presses generally are serving the needs of their newspaper customers, but the Kansas Press Association has long urged its members to develop contingency plans to cover a variety of challenges, according to executive director Emily Bradbury.
“Being in Tornado Alley like our fellow press associations in the Midwest, we encourage our members to always have a backup plan in case of a natural disaster or press breakdown,” she said
“Luckily our printers are meeting the demand and working with their customers to make any transition as easy as possible..
KPA president Travis Mounts is in a wait-and-see mode. He’s editor and part-owner of Times-Sentinel Newspapers in Cheney, KS, and has been involved in recent printing consolidations, which, so far, have not been disruptive.
“Kansas newspapers have a level of uncertainty for the future, rather than immediate problems,” he said. “If we lose more presses though, there will be a concern because there will not be enough capacity for all the newspapers. Or printing may become prohibitive for some because of cost or colliding deadlines.”
Mounts is worried that consolidation will eliminate printing options close to home for newspapers. Already, in Wichita, there are only three presses within a two-hour drive, he said.
In the early 2000s, Mounts printed his newspapers at the Wichita Eagle. But over time, The Wichita Eagle, the Topeka Capital Journal and the Lawrence Journal-World eliminated their printing operations and have come to rely on the Kansas City Star for their printing. The communities the Times-Sentinel Newspapers cover are essentially bedroom communities for Wichita, and he relies on the Postal Service to deliver most of his newspapers, with racks and a small carrier force distributing monthly free distribution products.
He believes his newspapers’ long-term future depends on business from Wichita because that is where his readers work and shop.
“Our Main Street has fewer retail outlets, and fewer residents are in town during the workday, compared to how it used to be,” he said. “Our communities are growing but the retail business doesn’t reflect that growth. Fast food restaurants and national chains have replaced local businesses that traditionally supported local newspapers.”
Mounts believes printing-press challenges will push more and more publications online, and for now, while he is still married to print, he continues to scrutinize what digital growth might look like for the small newspapers he publishes.
Kern advises publishers that still operate a press to use it to its full capacity and print as many newspapers as possible, and he’s relieved to have had the option of sending his pages to the Review-Journal.
“The Review-Journal already had sent me quotes. I don’t know what a plan B would have looked like for us,” he said.
Smithson sees salvation through cooperation. He recognizes that while newspapers have always been good neighbors, they must be willing to make compromises and work together for the greater good as never before, piggybacking on each other’s print needs, even if that means adjusting page sizes, deadlines and delivery times.
“Printing newspapers used to be the coolest job ever, and the future relies on cooperation and compromise,” he said. “I can’t imagine the day when there will not be any printing at all, but publishers must work with each other to ensure this.”
Correction: An earlier version of this article stated that the Humboldt Sun joined Battle Born Media’s newspapers in transferring its printing from the Salt Lake Tribune to the Las Vegas Review-Journal. It was actually the High Desert Advocate in West Wendover, not the Humboldt Sun, that made the change.
This article was specially commissioned by the Nevada Press Association and the National Newspaper Association’s Publisher’s Auxiliary.