A never-ending discussion What will happen to our well-know media landscape

It is a never-ending discussion that has been bothering the media business for quite a while: what will happen to our well-know media landscape? Will there be print media in the future or will we only be surfing through a cyber spaced media world. Meanwhile, in many countries of the world, newspapers show immense growth rates, new titles push to the market, and some circulations even rise and rise. So what is really going on? There are different new trends appearing on the market. We introduce you to some of them so you can get your own idea.

Flexible in detail
One credo is target group orientation. Contents shall be adapted to reader’s needs in order to increase the newspaper’s quality and give it a better survival chance. But also a regionalization up to event hyper local contents takes place today: New newspaper models are reaching the markets. Today international newspaper cooperate with local papers, international freesheets are published in different countries, target group oriented titles and also multilingual papers are no longer the exeeption on the worldwide newspaper market.

Dear Mr. Doe- here’s you newspaper
Newspaper publishers and printing companies are always seeking for improvements and new business models. As the examples show, the goal is more and more individualized paper, meeting all needs: the needs of the readers for information but also for fun, glamour and entertainment; the needs of advertising for target group oriented high-class ads; and finally the needs of the publishers for revenue and success. For quite a long time addresses of subscribers have been printed on the newspaper covers via inkjet- with a more or less good printing quality. Now Inkjet printing is possible inside the paper. The reasons for that progress are variable data handling and improved quality- all shown by the inkjet head that was integrated in manroland newspaper presses in cooperation with Kodak: the first industrial solution of inkjet integration enabling imprinting at full press speed of up to 15 meters per second.

Shining trends and boundless creativity
More and more publishers today think about heatset/coldest technology to give their papers more gloss, glamour and attention. The advantages are easily considered: refined heatset products enable new business models, raise the product quality and diversity and crate new possibilities for advertisements. These creative newspaper concepts not only give daily papers the chance to produce ads or inserts for high-class consumer products. They also meet the demand of many readers that do not only consider their paper as an informative media but also as a piece of entertainment.

The advertisement sector is breaking new ground. The ideas range from transparent paper via metallic or neon inks up to ads with special scented inks. Eye catchers for newspaper ads are special folding possibilities such as super panorama, which means four full broadsheet pages, halfcovers, that cover a newspaper page with half a page, or flying pages with a half page also on the back of the section.