Tag Archives: print

Trialing the new NZ Herald print edition

You can’t blame the NZ Herald for trying. Over the last few weeks we’ve had a free trial subscription to the paper’s print edition. Each morning a copy arrives in our letter box before breakfast.

As the paper’s headline writers might say: the Herald is a blast from the past.

For most of my life I’ve had a daily newspaper – for most of my adult life I’ve worked on daily newspapers, that’s another story.

We got out of the daily paper habit after moving back to Auckland. One reason is we get our news online. Another reason is the NZ Herald is, well, not a great paper. Not awful, just not great.

In Australia we had the Sydney Morning Herald and either The Australian or The Financial Review. In Wellington we had the pre-merger Dominion. In London it was The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph. All of them packed with good reading material.

My free trial subscription to the print edition of the NZ Herald ends today. I won’t renew.

There are good journalists working for the NZ Herald. But not enough interesting, readable material to make it worth paying for.

We found we like the weekday paper more than the weekend editions. Whatever the Herald says, the paper has moved downmarket since moving to a tabloid format (for some reason the Herald is keen to describe its size as ‘compact’ and not tabloid). There’s too much celebrity nonsense, a lot of silly filler material and not enough serious news. Sadly there’s little intelligent comment.

I can read the world’s best papers, the ones I named above, plus the New York Times online each day. Better still I can get the best stuff from the NZ Herald free on my iPad.

Would I pay for an iPad subscription? That depends on the price. Anything more than $100 a year would be too much.

The joy of print

Moving to Auckland from Sydney was a disappointment on the newspaper front. After getting The Sydney Morning Herald each day and the Australian Financial Review on some days The New Zealand Herald was a big step down.

Before that we used to have daily delivery of The Dominion and would often also get the Wellington Evening Post. In London there was The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph and random other UK papers.

So about three years ago, I stopped getting a daily newspaper and moved to on-line publications for my main news fix.

Recently our next door neighbours asked us to empty their mailbox each day while they were overseas. This meant two weeks of seeing the daily printed edition of the New Zealand Herald instead of reading it on-line.

The NZ Herald is still a terrible paper compared with the others I’ve mentioned, but I enjoyed getting it each day far more than I expected. So much that I’m toying with the idea of having it delivered.

Three things quickly became clear:

  • I read a wider range of stories in a printed paper than on-line including stories that I’d never both to click on.
  • Longer stories are easier to read in print than on-line. I knew this all along, but was amazed at how pronounced this is in practice.
  • My concentration was better with the print paper and I came away having learnt more.

None of these things will stop the march of on-line and the demise of print newspapers, however we are going to lose a lot by abandoning print.  

Great-looking new site for PC User

PC User has long reigned as one of Australia’s most popular tech magazine in print, but has had a restricted online help station and not a full-blown website.

Yesterday a beta version of a new site was on display at pcuser.net.au (no longer online).

The site looks great, perhaps a little too like WordPress – don’t they all these days? In fact it uses Drupal.

It contains much of what readers would expect from PC User: help, reviews, guides and downloads, in that order. A note from editor Glenn Rees explains what’s going on and says more content will be added in coming weeks.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this is Rees says many of the big features and the exclusive software will be held back for the print magazine.

PC User’s greatest strength has always been its status as the technology magazine for people who don’t regard themselves as geeks. Its focus is on practical, not bleeding edge, computing.

Microsoft Word’s missing feature

Microsoft continues to develop Word and add features. The software is mature and stable.

I use it every day in work as a writer, but I’m frustrated I can’t use it to create professional, high-end output.

You couldn’t produce a great-looking printed book with Word. There’s little point sending Word manuscripts to professional book printers. And Word is not much better when it comes to top-flight on-line layouts or creating classy PDFs.

Word does basic page layout well enough. It seems designed for people who still print documents using laser printers and ink-jets. It is fine for emailed documents.

Word’s new fonts are gorgeous. Calibri works particularly well on-screen. The problem is you never know which fonts Word will use when you send a document to another computer. Things can go wrong when you send Word documents to commercial printers or pre-press companies.

Colour is also a Word danger-zone. You never know what colour you’ll see at the other end.

I’ve found if I’m just doing low-resolution work, Word is good enough.

When I’m creating high-end documents or working with professional printers, I still have to use Adobe InDesign. At around NZ$1,500 that’s an expensive sledgehammer cracking my layout nuts.

How print publishing works: copy sales

In the golden age of print publishing, copy sales were an important source of revenue.

With publishers like Rupert Murdoch building online paywalls for news sites, selling publications to readers, not giving them away, could enjoy a renaissance.

Here’s how copy sales fit in the old school print publishing business model I grew up with.

Print publishers rarely keep all the money from copy sales.

Newsagents, book stores and other outlets sell newspapers, magazines and books. They earn a margin of around 30% of a magazine or book’s cover price.

Margins are lower for newspapers, but newsagents make it up with volume plus they can sell customers extra items with better margins.

In some cases distributors take a second slice of the sales revenue. Either a percentage or a fixed fee per copy.

Sell-through rates

Retailers rarely sell every copy of their newspapers and magazines.

Publishers talk of sell-through rates – that’s the percentage sold. Retailers usually send unsold magazines – usually just the masthead – back to distributors to get a refund on unsold copies. Newspapers are similar. We call the copies sent back ‘ returns’.

Poorly managed titles have a low sell-through rate. Others can have a higher rate.

Some publications sell out – but this is rare. Publishers regard selling-out as a failure because it means they don’t get maximise sales. Newsagents like this because they don’t have to worry about returns.

Returns are controversial with newsagents and retailer because they often have to carry the cost of holding stock on behalf of publishers.

Long established, popular, frequently-published titles typically have better sell through rates than new or irregular publications. That’s largely because publishers have more information to help them plan print runs and know where to send copies.

Revenue lags sales

Copy sales revenue for monthly titles usually takes a month or two to trickle from the reader, through the retailer and distributor back to the publisher.

Printers want payment – or a guarantee of payment before the presses role. So a publisher needs to carry the costs of at least three editions of a monthly title before seeing a penny in copy sales revenue.

This would cost more for weeklies, less for bi-monthlies and quarterly magazines.

Revenue lag explains why so many publishers are keen to sell their titles direct to readers through subscription sales.

Subscriptions are lucrative for publishers.

First, the money arrives upfront – usually a year in advance. Some publications offer two-year and even three-year subscriptions.

Second, a publisher gets to keep all the revenue – there’s no retailer cut – but mailing out subscriptions has a cost attached and there’s a small management fee paid if an external company handles subscriptions.

Have I missed anything here? Do you have any questions about how this works? Please add your comments and questions below or get in touch through my contact page.

Paperless office fallacy

I’m not surprised an HP executive called the paperless office a fallacy – why would the world’s largest computer printer maker say otherwise.

HP senior vice president Bruce Dahlgren says: “It is unrealistic to think that printing is just going to go away”.

Computerworld Australia reports him saying: ” the way people print and copy is changing.” Dahlgren says people are printing more documents but fewer pages. They take more care about what gets printed.

I do the same.

Since starting my paperless journalist project I’ve managed to cut the number of printed pages by more than 60%, but zero remains a long way off.

I rarely print incoming documents for reading. But I still need to proof-read on paper – especially when I write important or longer pieces.

There’s no question I catch more errors in my work when proof-reading paper documents. I’m not alone. Online reading is tiring and online proofing is less accurate.