Editors Weblog outlines the production steps:

On the client’s side the process is very simple. After signing up for a short-term subscription (more on that later), they have until 2 p.m. to choose their news sources for the following morning’s paper. On Niiu’s website they can select from a wide variety of publications and online sources; from national, local or international newspapers like the New York Times, or internet news sources and blogs. A 24-page personalized paper, researched from and composed of their choices, then appears on the subscriber’s doorstep the next morning.

The business is based on strategic partnerships with content creators and print service providers to handle everything from content creation to the Web portal to printing and distribution.

According to one of the founders, a printed version made the most sense, “We asked this target group which is the most comfortable and which is the best distribution channel; is it an e-paper, is it only on mobile, is it printed or online? The feedback was that for now, paper is still the best distribution channel.” However they pointed out that future offerings could be delivered to mobile phones or e-paper devices.

Niiu’s website is located at http://www.niiu.de/ (German only).

Niiu’s publishing model sounds very similar to what the Knight News Challenge funded project Printcasting is building: an easy to use interface that “allow individuals to easily create ad-supported, customized publications with a mix of local news and information”

NW: Mal, most people probably don’t think of Océ as having a history in inkjet printing, yet you’ve introduced several models of the JetStream family in a bit over a year and a half. But you haven’t done this on your own. Tell me about the alliance with Miyakoshi that has led to the JetStream line.

MB: Let me answer that in a couple of steps. First, Océ actually has developed a lot of inkjet technology and provided innovation and industry leadership in a number of markets. Our first inkjet products came to market almost 15 years ago. The wide format side of the company has been very successful and has the leading market share in some segments of wide and superwide format printing. Some machines, like the Arizona line of flatbed printers that can also print roll-to-roll, have won awards for innovation and quality. Last year at drupa I’m sure you saw our CrystalPoint solid toner technology which can be jetted onto a wide variety of substrates. At GraphExpo 2008, the Océ Colorwave 600 with Océ CrystalPoint technology won a Must See ‘Em award and this product has been recognized once again for PRINT 09 with a Must See ‘Em Encore award. Océ R&D developed and we manufacture these products. Of course, these wide format machines address a different market and at lower speeds than a production press, but the underlying knowledge of inkjet technology, chemistry, color, and material science has been very instrumental as we developed the JetStream family.

Second, our relationship with Miyakoshi is very much a strategic alliance that draws on the strength of both companies. Miyakoshi is a well-known offset press manufacturer that was developing an inkjet technology. We’ve brought our expertise in inkjet, color management, controllers, security, and error recovery systems for high-speed, high-volume digital printing. The win-win is that JetStream is built like a press for heavy duty use, our SRA MP [Massively Parallel] front-end can handle every aspect of the data in full color, and can be easily integrated into any PRISMA-based system as just another print engine.

NW: So Miyakoshi builds the press and Océ does the controller. To what extent has Océ been involved in machine design and engineering?

MB: It depends on the press. With the JetStream 1000, Océ and Miyakoshi worked closely to jointly design the product. So together we drew on our expertise in paper transport systems to create a paper path that would give us the compact design we needed but still achieved our speed and throughput targets. Miyakoshi designed and built the type of frame and overall design needed to make this press a reality. Meanwhile, our software and controller teams made sure the DFE would be robust enough to handle the high print volume customers will expect on the press. And we’ve already talked about our innovation with jettable MICR ink.

NW: Talk to me about software and what it takes to operate one of your inkjet systems.

MB: All our JetStream presses run the same PRISMA job management and workflow software as our toner-based presses. Of course with JetStream there are some additional controls for color management, but these are similar to those used on our ColorStream family of continuous feed toner-based presses. While the mechanical processes for running and maintaining the machines vary, the workflow software that manages the jobs through the production process is the same whether it’s on a monochrome cut-sheet system like a VarioPrint 6250, a ColorStream 10000 or one of the JetStream family. This makes it easy for customers to cross-train equipment operators and help contain staffing costs. But you know, it goes beyond operating the machines. You have to be profitable. We’ll be making some exciting announcement at PRINT 09 about some new software that will help printers price inkjet applications more profitably.

Leveraging its legacy and expertise make sense but there’s still more to a successful digital press than speeds and feeds. It’s building the volume that makes a system profitable. And those are points are what we talk about next time.

The Printed Blog published a printed version of internet-based content twice a day. Content was selected based on the votes of readers and their geographic location. In its short existence, the service produced 16 issues, distributed 80,000 print copies, and 100,000 copies downloaded.

The Press Release from Printcasting:

Printcasting Expands to More U.S. Cities Through Partnerships

(Bakersfield, Calif. June 25, 2009) Today Printcasting (http://www.printcasting.com), a democratized publishing technology funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and The Bakersfield Californian, announced that it’s expanding service to more cities across the United States through partnerships. Among the new cities are Denver and Boulder, Colo.; Los Angeles, Calif.; and the San Francisco Bay area.

New city-focused Printcasting sites are launching throughout the year in partnership with other local newspapers and organizations. The first partner is the targeted publishing group of MediaNews Group, which owns 54 daily newspapers in 11 states, including The Denver Post and San Jose Mercury News.

Printcasting (http://www.printcasting.com) allows anyone to be a publisher by tying online content to publication templates which can be printed out and viewed on the Web and mobile devices. By going to Printcasting.com, anyone can quickly create a self-updating, printable magazine that features their own content, as well as content from participating news providers and bloggers. Target users range from individuals who are passionate about local interests, to organizations such as schools and homeowners’ associations, to professional publishers who are building a portfolio of targeted niche products. They can also make money from their publications through an integrated self-serve advertising tool that small local businesses can use to create highly targeted ads.

The Printcasting project is funded by an $837,000 grant from the Knight News Challenge – which is a five-year, $25 million contest that seeks to find new models for local news and information that use digital technology. Printcasting has been profiled in Business Week and The Miami Herald, and has been called a “Must-Do Strategy” by the World Association of Newspapers.

The first Printcasting pilot site launched in Bakersfield, Calif., in late March in conjunction with The Bakersfield Californian newspaper. Since then, hundreds of people have created magazines (called “Printcasts”). In addition, The Californian plans to use the site to create its own topically oriented niche publications.

“We’re excited to take what’s worked in Bakersfield and see how it plays out elsewhere,” said Dan Pacheco, Printcasting’s founder and Senior Product Manager at The Californian. The project has received interest by people in almost every continent, and especially from newspapers.

“We’ve known for some time that local readers and advertisers respond well to printed content as long as it speaks to their unique interests. This started with citizen-journalism pioneer The Bakersfield Voice in 2004, and was then proven with Bakotopia.com, which provides content for the ad-supported Bakotopia Magazine.”

MediaNews Group, which also has its own experiments with “Individuated News,” will be using Printcasting initially as an engine for its own staff to create niche magazines that use content from MediaNews Group writers, supplemented with content from local bloggers. “By using Printcasting, it’s easier and less expensive to create new magazines and see how they resonate with an audience before investing more time and money,” said Peter Vandevanter, MediaNews Group’s Vice President of Targeted Products.

MediaNews Group has also agreed to make its own content available to citizen publishers, and to promote Printcasting in its markets.

Pacheco said that early experiments in digital-print hybrid magazines in Bakersfield, such as Bakotopia.com and Bakotopia Magazine, show that there is money to be made in niche publications. However, you need a lot of them to replace the revenue that daily newspapers have lost in recent years. “We think one way to do that is to turn the publishing role over to people in your community, and get your salespeople to promote a self-serve advertising tool. This increases your profit margins by decreasing your costs,” Pacheco said.

Profit isn’t limited to newspapers, either. One unique aspect of Printcasting is that ad revenue is shared with participating citizen publishers and content providers. “We’re starting out by sharing 60% of the revenue directly with publishers – the people who put the most time, effort and money into promoting their publications,” Pacheco said. In addition, content contributors receive 30% of all ad revenue on the network, in proportion to how often their content is used.

The Printcasting network keeps only 10% of that ad revenue for operating expenses. “In keeping with the spirit of the Knight News Challenge, our primary goal is to find a sustainable way to allow news and information to be shared within local communities. Our portion will only ever be high enough to allow us to keep the network going and expand to cities that are a good fit for the product,” Pacheco said.

Printcasting’s revenue sharing system creates unique opportunities for companies such as newspaper publishers that already have people who specialize in content, publishing, marketing and sales. The more they put into the product, the higher their reward, Pacheco said.

“We didn’t originally design Printcasting for newspapers to use internally, but just like citizen publishers, they’re permitted and encouraged to use it to lower their production costs – and maybe even make some money from underutilized content,” Pacheco said.

Because newspapers are seen as content experts where they live, Pacheco said that it’s in their interest to establish an early lead with Printcasting by seeding their markets with their own local content and magazines. “If they put time and money into printing and distributing their magazines, more people will read them and they will be able to charge more for advertising. And if citizen publishers use newspapers’ content to fill the pages of their own Printcasts, the newspapers will get a share of those publishers’ ad revenue. It’s a win-win scenario no matter how you look at it,” Pacheco said.

Already there are condensed versions of several international newspapers, digitally printed and distributed primarily to hotels and airlines. On long flights, the newspapers being read often contain the stories that will be in the morning paper in the destination cities, helping business travelers stay current. That’s admittedly something of a niche market, but let’s take it a step further.

Imagine you’re from Manchester, England and vacationing in Tuscany. You pick up a copy of the Guardian and while reading the latest about Manchester United you find many of the ads to be primarily for Tuscan eateries, tour guides and other businesses that can make your trip more enjoyable.

Or maybe you’re a printer in the United States. You know there are neighborhoods in your city peopled by immigrants from Romania and the Czech Republic, all hungry for news from home. So you work with the newspapers to obtain the digital files and produce the paper for local distribution— with ads for local businesses.

There’s no question that ad pages are dwindling, yet newspaper advertising is still a relatively low-cost way to reach a wide audience. But suppose ads and free-standing inserts were based on zip codes and demographics? Newspapers have long had sections targeting specific circulation areas, replete with ads for local businesses. But imagine such targeting being based on clusters of zip codes so that ads vary based on where the paper was sold or delivered. Improved targeting can make it even more effective if used, for example, in conjunction with a cross-media campaign that points readers to web landing pages that enable tracking and follow-up. Yes, this ads complexity and requires advertisers’ marketing departments to think differently, but it makes newspapers a richer resource and adds value to them as an advertising medium. It means that newspapers and advertisers alike have to change the way they think, but it’s hardly an insurmountable barrier or insoluble problem.

There’s no question that newspapers are going to change. And there’s no doubt that many in the U.S. are going to fail. But if newspaper publishers join the 21st century and change how they think about their business, they can revitalize their operations and redefine their enterprise. Digital print, both toner and inkjet technologies, combined with an array of readily available software, can help make this a reality. Newspapers aren’t dead, or even dying. But many need an injection of imagination and digital technology to reinvent them as a 21st century media.

InfoTrends recently conducted an extensive study to understand present and future digital print applications within the newspaper industry. The result of our research can be summed up in The Emerging Digital Printing Opportunity in Newspaper Publishing, which details:

• - An overview of the newspaper industry
• - Current newspaper production workflow
• - The case for moving to digital newspaper production
• - Existing and future applications of digital newspaper production
• - Adoption challenges (hardware, software, and recycling considerations)
• - Recommendations for greater digital print adoption with newspaper

As existing newspaper publishers think about new ways to bring back print advertising dollars, they need to look not only at online models, but also how they can differentiate their print offerings. Digital printing can be utilized not only as a means for short-run production, but also for personalized content and targeted advertising. One of the things that we found when talking with some newspaper publishers is that there’s a lack of awareness about the possibilities that digital printing can offer to newspaper production. Market education is key. Reports like this one, as well as digital printing hardware vendors providing clear proof-of-concept applications and case studies of digital newspaper production successes can give a glimpse to newspaper publishers about new opportunities they can take advantage of.

So what are your thoughts on digital printing for newspaper production? Let us know.

Yesterday, I got a chance to test it out in a more public venue in a column at PBS.org/mediashift. The title, chosen by the editor, is ‘Printernet’ Vision Brings Custom Print Publications to Masses”

The general tenor over there is that Print is Dead, newspapers have to go online, and other internet bedazzled visions of the future of journalism. I’m posting here in the hope of getting some feedback from my esteemed colleagues in Print, where I don’t have to take a defensive stance proving that the sky is not falling and print is not dead.

From a PR point of view the notion is “Now that the internet is in place, the printernet is ready to emerge.’ That’s for the kids in school to get them to be excited about Print.

From the professional point of view,”. . . this so-called “printernet” can have the same benefits as the Internet — massive parallel manufacturing with standards-based interfaces, real time production information and easy access for everyone. Each printer — the combination of the machinery and the intelligence that manages the machinery — is a print output node.”

My hypothesis is that one of the things that has kept us from seeing the emerging role for Print, is that we’ve been using old thought models that don’t capture a new environment. The facts on the ground are that the Eurocentric era of the global economy is coming to close and that new value in the form of previously impossible customer experiences are enabled by the network, not by stand alone printing companies.

While I was researching the column I came across pediapress.com in Germany. They’ve released Open Source software to automatically go from wikipedia pages to PDF,ODF, and XML. They are monetizing their invention by selling Wikipedia Printed books through their website. Just recently they’ve expanded from German to the other major European languages.

I think wikis have become the platform of choice for organizing content on the web. PBwiki.com, a start-up, says they are doing enterprise content management for over 200,000 businesses and 100′s of thousands of schools. Meanwhile, Newspapers and physical communities are organizing their content in wikis.

Given that my focus is high school education in the States, I think I’m seeing textbooks being replaced by WikiBooks and WikiNewspapers. The new experience will be cheaper, faster and much more effective in getting students to learn to love to learn.

I keep turning it over and over, and I can’t see why it wouldn’t work.

Any thoughts?

This week we publicly launched Printcasting in Bakersfield, California. While our focus is on outreach to the 330,000 people who live there, anyone can now use the site to create an automatically updating, printable PDF magazine.

More infomation about Printcasting at http://www.printcasting.com/

More information about the project at http://news.newspaperproject.org

Many newspapers are plagued with old and inefficient printing operations. Some are outsourcing their print, and others are turning to electronic media. There is an opportunity for Printers to benefit from these problems by providing modern printing and distribution strategies–from automated offset to print on-demand digital.

David Renouf of Newsworld says: “On the back of our contract with Associated Newspapers and with the increasing levels of interest we continue to receive from publishers, we are delighted to be partnering with AlphaGraphics, a best-in-class organisation offering second- to-none levels of quality and service. Similarly, we have taken the necessary steps to invest in the appropriate technology to ensure the requirements of our existing and future clients can be met.”

David Kovacs of AlphaGraphics added: “Newsworld and AlphaGraphics could not be a better match for this partnership. We are both focused on leading the market by servicing client’s needs with technology and customer focused solutions. I am sure others will be watching with anticipation to see where we are able to take this venture. Marrying Newsworld’s vision and experience with our operational excellence was too good an opportunity to pass up.”

As Renouf noted in his comment, Newsworld signed a four-year contract earlier this year with Associated Newspapers Ltd. to print copies of the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday in New York.