NewsBeat

June 2018 NewsBeat 5 • Increasing charges to commercial print customers. Many of our print contracts are based on newsprint price and are adjusted according to price per ton. Depending on whichever side of this increase you're on, it doesn't matter because everyone loses. If you're the commercial account and your price goes up, you lose. If you're the printer and you raise prices, chances are your client will reduce their page count or draw to offset the price increase and you'll lose revenue. Lose/lose, like most of the damage caused by these tariffs. • Waste reduction on press. We all pride ourselves on putting out a product we can be proud of, however as your press crew battles to get to first, good newsprint is falling into the waste stream. Take a look at your start-up procedures and what, if anything, you can do to reduce waste. Be careful not to compromise advertiser or editorial quality but still, turn over every rock. Meet with the newsroom if they have issues with remakes, meet with your press crew to hear their ideas on what can be done differently. I'm simply saying make the effort. • Reduction of returns. Any good circulation director will tell you that if you don't make papers available in the field you can't sell them and single copy revenue will suffer as a consequence. If your percentage of returns is excessively high, do what you can to control it. Are you sending 20 copies to a small convenience store on the fringe of your market and bringing back 15? Check on sales, and make sure that if you have racks in areas of high pilferage that it still makes sense to keep racks there. Review and monitor your field sales and adjust your draws accordingly. • Review NIE copies. This will depend on policy and any other non-paid copies that can be reduced. Years ago, many newspapers provided complementary copies to public service and other local groups as a gesture of community support. • Convert print subscribers to digital. This is obvious, yet it pains me to say it. I love print, but as our digital world continues to thrive, running specials to move readers and advertisers to digital just makes sense (and saves newsprint). • Elimination or reduction of TMC products. Every suggestion here has a downside. The downside here is missed opportunities to reach non-subscribers, less opportunities for advertisers to reach these readers, and driving more advertisers to digital or mass mailings through other vendors. • Special sections. Evaluate special sections reviewing each P & L and watch for switching advertising dollars between sections and core publications. Focus more on ROP to sustain the news hole and healthy advertising/editorial percentages. • Consolidate sections. If you have a weekly section that you run as an advance, take a look at the P & L for this run. Often "leaning up" and incorporating advance sections into the main can reduce newsprint waste and have little or no impact on advertising revenues. • Reduction of pages in special products. Many of us print TV tabs, puzzle books, comics and other features and insert them into our core products. Monitor draws for these products to eliminate newsprint waste while also reducing the number of pages published in these special products. Will it hurt the reader? Yes. Will it take away from the value in our products? Yes. Is it yet another step backward for the industry? Yes. But will we save newsprint and expense? Definitely. • Hopefully reader reaction will be limited. Reducing your puzzle book from 24 to 20 pages might not cause a riot in the streets, but it is another takeaway we're being forced into by the tariffs. If you question reader reaction by taking away a comic or two, try putting in a wrong comic strip by accident one day, and you'll quickly realize how many people are loyal readers of comic pages. Readers will notice and feel they're being given less. It's another lose/lose situation. • Web reductions. Before you write me to call me "Captain Obvious" (that actually happened already), yes, I do realize that most of us already have done this, and done it again and again, but guess what? Not all of us have. In the last year, I've converted a dozen commercial clients from a wider web and saved them money in the process. If your paper is not running on the leanest web possible, take a look at why and cost savings related to this change. • Reduction of pages in core publications. Evaluate your advertising/news percentage in your daily. Everyone has their own opinion, mine is if it's not close to 50/50 you either need to reduce your page counts or increase your advertising inches. Make a sincere effort to cut a couple pages out of the daily each day. It really adds up over time. To repeat myself: Is it going to hurt readers, value, quality, etc. — sure thing! But it adds up in newsprint savings very quickly and beats the next few suggestions I'm going to have. • Elimination of publication days. Many newspapers have already jumped on this bandwagon. Monday and Friday editions are most commonly the target, hoping to move preprint revenue to other days of the week and of course saving newsprint by the truckload. The obvious downside here is huge. • Risking additional losses in ad revenue to an already challenged industry • Serious loss of circulation revenue • Less news coverage and connections to our communities • Driving subscribers away from print • Reducing employees from full-time to part-time with some losing benefits that provide for their families • Hastening the demise of print • Job losses/workforce reductions. More than 600,000 jobs in the U.S. in one way or another rely on groundwood paper — jobs at our newspapers, newsprint mills throughout the country, book publishers and others. The affect on our industry will most likely be devastating. For most newspapers, the next largest expense behind human resources is paper. Increasing this cost by double digit percentages will result in necessary reductions in a workforce already suffering from severe workforce anemia. There isn't much more you can say here besides the ending result is going to hurt. Before I wrap things up, I'd like to touch on price increases and supply shortages from U.S. newsprint suppliers. At least one of these suppliers — Resolute — has joined STOPP to fight the tariffs, and I applaud them for the effort. When the tariffs were announced, almost instantaneously U.S. suppliers passed along an increase of their own. I spoke with a Resolute representative and asked why a U.S. supplier, located in the U.S., to whom we don't pay an import fee to would increase their pricing. It truly seemed to me like kicking publishers while they were down. I don't know if the answer justifies things, but it did make some sense to me. U.S. mills are currently operating at 97 percent of capacity. Resolute alone has taken 70 machines off-line since 2007 in response to industry cutbacks. It isn't easy, quick or inexpensive to get these mills back up and running, so for at least the immediate future, we're going to have to deal with shortages and higher prices from U.S. suppliers due to the fact they're working overtime and putting additional capital into their operations to keep up with supply and demand. Regardless of NORPAC's stand, it is apparent to me that this is not a trade matter, but more so a result of the steady decline in print products resulting in the progressive decline in demand for newsprint across the U.S. So far, more than 1,100 newspapers had already written letters critical of the tariffs and warning that imposing retaliatory import duties would have a "very severe impact on our industry." Evidently, these pleas fell on deaf ears in Washington. — Jerry Simpkins is vice president of the West Texas Printing Center, LLC in Lubbock, Texas. Contact him on Linkedin.com or at simpkins@tds.net .

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