Time to stand up for Pride in Print

It is time for the print industry to stand up and be proud of what it does. Despite the recession this is still a £14 billion industry. Print is still the main channel for the advertising industry to sell dreams. Millions of newspapers are printed and sold each day. Yet printers seem reticent about standing firm and declaring: “I’m proud to be a printer.”

This is something that we at First City Media come across all the time. And it is something that we plan to help change. We are launching the Pride in Print campaign to celebrate the quality of work that printers produce, the value that these printed products have and the power that print has to excite, inform and entertain. We will be looking for the most exciting, innovative and beautifully produced pieces of print each month and will celebrate these achievements, not just in the pages of PrintMedia Management, but also in our sister titles The Print Business and Brand Management. The readers of The Print Business are the owners and managers of the UK’s most successful and most innovative print companies; the executives that make the key decisions which provide the UK with a print supply chain to be proud of. The readers of Brand Management are those who have to choose which is the best channel to deliver value for their companies and who face even more pressure to move away from print towards the internet, email and SMS. We happen to believe that print should remain the channel of choice for marketing, advertising and publishing companies.

A beautifully printed magazine or brochure, on well-chosen paper, sells a dream like no other medium. The reader looking at an azure sky above a tropical beach printed in a magazine can be transported there better than with a few seconds on a television screen or on a small web page. Nobody ever wanted to curl up in bed with a computer when a book or magazine is an alternative. Print gives the reader the freedom to spend as long with a page as he or she wants, time that is not controlled by a television director. It is a pervasive medium, not an intrusive one.

But print is being challenged as never before. The rise of digital media provides what many consider an alternative to print. However, though the internet is still imperfectly understood, it is clear that it is complementary to print rather than a replacement for it. We want to find the best examples of how this works to demonstrate both to printers and to their customers that print has a strong and viable future in an interactive world.

Print is also under threat from the environmental lobby and others who consider that the industry destroys rainforests. The National Association of Paper Merchants is tackling this misconception through its commendable Two Sides website and campaign, which point out that paper is an inherently sustainable industry whose main raw material is a harvested crop.

However, there has been no equivalent campaign to promote printing itself. We know that those in the industry are passionate and proud of what they do, whether specifying print or carrying out the prepress, printing and finishing; proud of turning the designer’s dreams into a tangible product which sparks the imagination of the person reading it. We know that many have ink rather than blood coursing through their veins and that printing can take a grip on a person in a way that few other industries can manage. Printing is at once about manufacturing, about service and, yes, about skill, craft and judgement. It is possible to press a green button and so print something, but for truly effective printing, the skills of a printer continue to be needed.

Pride in Print will celebrate this. We have no plans for a one-off event where work is divided into sometimes artificial categories and where the industry congratulates itself. We want to carry the message about the power of print to customers, to demonstrate what print can do. We want these customers to propose work that they have commissioned that has excited and delighted them. We want printers to submit jobs that they have had the privilege of printing. We want to be awash with books, magazines, calendars, direct mail pieces, catalogues, cartons, labels, cards, brochures and any other examples of printing that stand out for their quality, their effectiveness and the impact that they have had on a customer’s business. We want to publicise the stories of these products just as we write about the success of the Ferrari magazine in this issue. This is a magazine for one of the finest cars in the world, a car built with Italian flair for engineering and style, and the magazine sent to excite Ferrari drivers was printed in south London.

We want to uncover more examples like this. We want readers of our three magazines to submit printed jobs and we will each month highlight the best in all the publications and websites that we have.

In difficult times the industry cannot afford to sit back and expect to be given work. Print will have to demonstrate time and time again that it is the best choice for a marketing campaign, the best medium to deliver information and to drive business. We believe Pride in Print is the perfect way to do this. We are committing ourselves to this; but we know too that it will work better with the support of our readers who we know are proud to be involved in this industry. We believe this deserves to be recognised. Join with us to show that we all have Pride in Print.