Death of Print?/Is Print Dying?

Is Print Dying?

        I’m not talking about writing. There are more words being written now then in any other time in our history. Everyone writes a little. Do you text? Do you write on a Blog? Do you Facebook? Do you have a MySpace account? How about Twitter? Words, ideas, and opinions are alive and well in our country.
        Printing, the physical ink on paper, is waning. Prices have come down in off-set printing over the past years making printing more affordable, but how is that supposed to compete with the online forums that pop up overnight? It seems that this contest is a lot one sided. In the past few weeks I have heard about four newspapers that are in trouble. Three of them are merging into a single publication to hopefully stem the tide. The other ended up as a complete shock. One of the most well known papers in eastern PA is filing for chapter 11.

        I know that this is a blog about Lit Mags, but, if the papers are struggling how long until our magazines are in the same situation? What are we going to do five years from now? The possibility exists for high school lit mags that have a miniscule operational cost. Buy some software once, make everything digital, burn it to a $.10 CD. The cost will be more in time than financial resources. What if you run it on the web? You can keep updating material every week for a few hundred bucks a year.
        There are some of us that dread the day that the physical magazine becomes a thing of the past. I love holding the book, mag, paper, whatever, in my hands. I am as giddy as a school boy when the boxes of this year’s magazines is delivered and I can see all of our students hard work in bulk. All of those spins lined up. Nothing like it. I will miss that.

        So where does this leave us? The first amendment is alive and well. Words are everywhere. Paper may not be the preference in a few years. What are you going to do to deal with the changing times?

Talking to the Printer

        In previous posts, Printing Options and Printing Time, we discussed the printing of a magazine. I would like to briefly revisit this as it is becoming the time of year when you should be talking to your printer in preparation for your magazine.

        I suggest talking to a printer at the beginning of your layout process so that you can avoid problems later on. If you take the time to layout a beautiful magazine only to find out that you can’t afford it you will be upset, to say the least. When you talk to a printer they can bring their experience to the table to help you problem solve. In our magazine, last year, we found that by making our page size 7 1/4 inches2 instead of the 8 inches2 we were originally going with, the printer saved us money because he could print 24 pages per signature (12 pages on each side) instead of the standard 16 pages (8 pages on each side). This allowed us to do a full 4 color magazine. If we hadn’t talked to the printer we would have had serious decisions to make before we went to press.

        Now, for those of you who may not be able to go to the printers, you may still want to talk with a printer. They may be able to help you with some tips and tricks (If they help you pay them back by giving them a free listing in your patrons list, or a thank you in the acknowledgments). In the past a different printer actually bound the magazine for us, but we printed the guts. You never know what they might be able to help with.

Printing Time

So we have gotten to the time of year when the printer comes around. I would be interested to here from you how your magazine is printed. Do you do it yourself? Do you use an Internet printer? Do you use a local printer?
Our philosophy (The advisers) is to use a local printer. We feel it is important to keep our business in the area. In the past, we have had problems with a local printer, only to have another local printer come to our rescue. After that company was bought out we found another local print shop and we are now working with them for a second year.
We met with our account representative from the printer last evening. He came to the school to talk with us. We outlined our ideas with the rep and looked at samples. I cannot tell you how important it is to be able to have a face to face. We were able to see and touch actual samples of the cover stock and text stock that we wanted to use in this years mag. We were able to talk about the paper size and the colors we wanted to use.
The other benefit that we found, with our present printer, is the technological aspect of printing. We are able to work on our file in Adobe InDesign CS at school, burn it on a CD and send it to them. They pull it into their system and we have a proof in a few days. Now it's gotten better! The have an FTP site that we can upload the file to! That means that when we are finished we send it to their server and they pull it down. The amount of time that this saves us, from even two years ago, is staggering. Going from printing our magazine completely ourselves, to sending the file electronically, in less than three years?!

Find a printer that will talk to you. Better yet find a printer that will sit down and show you printing and paper samples. The printer has probably done this for a while and can help you with problems as they arise.

Printing Options

So, now onto Part II of the response.

"I'm an editor of the literary magazine at Aspen High School in Colorado. Our litmag team has a theme (Spectrum), but we are short on ideas for layout and overall design. I'm also interested in cheaper methods of printing, having gone far over budget on our last two editions. Any advice would be greatly appreciated." -Lars

To discuss the second part of this comment. Printing, I think, is the biggest headache in publishing. In the short time that I have been involved with the printing part of the magazine I have seen a lot of stuff. We have gone from having the mag cover and binding pulled out from under us, to having the printer that we were working with being bought out.
In last year's magazine ! (Yep that's it "!"), we stumbled onto Duotone. This is a photoshop tool that can make a grayscale image appear to have a single color in it. You convert the image to grayscale and select a pantone color. It is hard to explain with out looking at an image or Photoshop. By doing this you give the impression of color in grayscale images, without the cost of 4-color. In your layout software, you can also create swatches using the pantone color that you used for the duotone image. This means that you are only going to be printing in black and one color. Pantone inks are the same, no matter what printer you go to. Pantone colors take the place of one of the inks that are part of CMYK. So you are only printing in two colors.

Binding is also something that can save you money. Look at several printers in your area. Talk to them and explain what you are doing. Perfect binding is one expensive option. You can go with a stapled binding as well. It really depends on what you want. Ask the printers for examples of their printing and their binding.

The last option, that I have to be honest I have little knowledge of, is online printing. Do a Google search and go from there.

I hope that this post, and the previous post, help to answer your questions Lars.