Consolidation is sending more titles to fewer press halls. Most of the new ones are too small for a coldset line. Here is what printers across Europe are doing about that.

There is a press hall in Athens that prints ninety newspaper titles. Sixty Greek, thirty foreign. Seven days a week, year round, into a distribution network of islands where flights and ferries have to be coordinated so that nothing arrives late.

Ninety titles is not a volume problem. It is a changeover problem, and it is the reason that work does not sit on a coldset line.

By the end of this you will know:

  • why the titles you turn down today are the ones worth chasing tomorrow
  • what the plants investing in digital capacity right now are actually buying it for
  • the three things that decide whether a second press pays for itself

First, the question that has wasted ten years

Will digital replace your offset press? No. And the most public attempt to prove otherwise was reversed within two years.

In June 2015 Mengis Druck in Visp, Switzerland, moved the Walliser Bote, six issues a week at roughly 22,000 copies, onto an HP T400. It was presented at the time as the first daily newspaper in the world produced on an HP T400 inkjet web press. By January 2017 the paper was being printed externally.

The reasons given were commercial, not technical. The digital press was blocked by the newspaper during exactly the hours commercial customers wanted it, and Swiss press halls had so much spare capacity that buying offset from a neighbour was simply cheaper.

Two capacity planning problems. Neither is solved by choosing a better press, which is why they come back at the end of this article as the two things most likely to sink a second press in your own plant.

What consolidation actually hands you

In Switzerland, TX Group is closing two of Tamedia's three plants, Bussigny in March 2025 and Zurich at the end of 2026, moving everything to Bern. The explanation was blunt: running three plants economically is no longer possible.

In Denmark, Erritsø Tryk once produced around 60 percent of all Danish newspapers. COO and production director Flemming Heding Pedersen lists what has gone: "We've closed two large printing plants and removed 10 double wide double round towers, four folders, and two postpress facilities."

In the UK, News UK and DMG Media merged their printing in 2024 and closed two sites. What remains prints more than three million papers a night, including contract work for Telegraph Media Group, the Financial Times, Newsquest and the Evening Standard. The two companies put the fall in national print circulation at more than 60 percent over ten years.

If you are reading this from a plant that is doing fine, that is precisely the point. Rodi Group in the Netherlands runs a healthy press hall, six towers and four folders on a K&B Cortina, printing titles including the Financial Times. Commercial work has already become important there to offset falling newspaper circulation, and Rodi has been adding postpress capacity and trying new formats to win more of it. CEO Dick Ranzijn on the market: "Print copy declines are manageable for now, but we see reductions everywhere, even with major clients."

So the presses that survive get busier. And they inherit more than volume. They inherit a tail: local weeklies, free sheets, community papers, association titles, foreign editions, supplements. Individually small. Collectively, a business.

Almost none of it fits comfortably into a coldset window.

The maths of a small run

Digitaprint, part of the French regional publisher Sogemedia, put numbers on this when it moved work onto a Kodak Prosper press.

Start up waste on offset: around 1,500 copies. On digital: 20 to 30. Crew: five per shift on offset, two on digital.

Now take a title whose entire run is 2,000 copies. On offset the start up waste alone is three quarters of the run length. You burn roughly 1,500 copies of paper before the first saleable one, to sell 2,000. Add the plates, the makeready time and the slot in an already tight schedule, and the answer your production manager gives sales is no. Not because the job is bad. Because the press is the wrong tool for it.

What happened next at Sogemedia is the part worth stealing. With the constraint gone, one regional weekly became seven weekly versions, one per district. CEO Jean Pierre de Kerraoul: "It no longer made sense to offer one and the same content to all readers."

That is not a cost saving. That is a new line in the rate card.

Who is doing this right now

One pattern runs through all of these.

Amedia Trykk, Norway. Announced with Canon in December 2025: 93,000 tabloid pages an hour, more than 330 million pages a year. CEO Morten Kringler: "The transition to digital printing is crucial if we are to maintain a physical newspaper offering in an economically and environmentally responsible way for a long time to come." The stated goals are matching production to real circulation, cutting paper waste, and regionalising editorial content and advertising.

Polaris Trykk, Norway. A Ricoh press with an inline Hunkeler newspaper finishing line at Orkanger, announced August 2026, live January 2027, for newspapers, magazines and special publications. Managing director Oddvar Ustad: "We still believe the printed newspaper will have an important role for many of our media houses and readers. Digital printing gives us a new tool that makes it easier to adapt production to how the market develops."

Eucles Daily in France and KP Services in Jersey. Both print titles that used to arrive by plane. Eucles runs international papers same day in Paris, rarely more than 2,000 copies each, queueing up to twenty separate orders onto one roll. KP Services began printing more than twenty UK national titles on Jersey in 2016, instead of flying finished copies in.

The Miller Group, Greece and Malta. The Athens plant from the opening is the group's Greek subsidiary. In Malta the group stopped importing printed newspapers and now produces them locally. It already names books on demand, university publications and government communications as work the same line can take.

In almost every case offset keeps the volume and digital takes the titles offset cannot afford to touch, then goes hunting for work that was never a newspaper at all. The exception proves the rule. Malta moved its newspaper work off offset entirely, but only after local volumes fell so far that analogue production had stopped paying for itself on an island market. Replacement happens at the very bottom of the volume scale. Everywhere else, digital is the second press.

The three things that decide whether it pays

Two presses means a decision on every single job. Which line, at what run length, at what cost, in which slot.

Most printers make that call by feel. Keypoint Intelligence reported in January 2025 that 30 percent of print service providers do not calculate their cost crossover points at all. Of those who do, 26 percent still use a calculator. Forty percent say they lack the data. And the answer keeps moving anyway: total cost of ownership on large production digital equipment has fallen by more than half in a decade, so a crossover point calculated three years ago is sending jobs to the wrong press today.

Unlike a general ERP, a Print MIS/ERP built for newspaper production knows what a makeready costs you, what a version costs you, and what a job actually consumed once it ran. Three capabilities turn that into money.

Post calculation on every job. Not the estimate. Actual paper, ink, waste and time against what you quoted. This is the first Mengis problem. They discovered their neighbours were cheaper than their own press. Would you know if that were true of yours, on which jobs, and by how much? Without post calculation you have opinions about your crossover point, not a number. If you are still choosing a system, seven things to consider before you choose a Print MIS covers what to look for.

One schedule across both technologies. The second Mengis problem. The newspaper and the commercial work wanted the same machine at the same hour, so the commercial revenue that was meant to justify the press never arrived. That is a planning failure, and it is preventable the moment both lines sit in one production plan. Moving that planning into one system is its own project, which we walk through in how to switch Print MIS/ERP without missing an edition.

A publishing and insert calendar that carries versions. Seven district editions is seven times the planning and seven times the chance of getting it wrong by hand.

Get those right and the tail becomes the most profitable part of your week, because you are the only plant in the region that can quote on it.

The short version

  • Consolidation does not only hand the surviving plant more volume. It hands it a tail of titles that are too small for a coldset line to take profitably.
  • The one plant that tried to replace offset outright went back within two years. The investments announced since put digital alongside offset rather than in place of it.
  • Buying the press is the easy part. What decides whether it pays is post calculation on every job, one schedule across both lines, and a calendar that can carry versions.

Frequently asked questions

Will digital printing replace offset in newspaper production?

Not for the main daily run. The one widely publicised attempt to replace offset outright, Mengis Druck in Switzerland in 2015, moved its daily back to external offset printing within two years. The investments announced since, including Amedia Trykk and Polaris Trykk in Norway, add digital capacity alongside offset. Full substitution shows up only at the very small end, such as Malta, where local volumes had fallen too far for offset to pay. Offset stays economical for long runs. Digital covers the short runs and versioned work that offset cannot handle profitably.

At what run length does digital printing beat offset for newspapers?

There is no single industry number, and anyone who offers you one is guessing at your cost base. Published European cases run from a few hundred copies per title up to around 10,000 copies of a 24 page product. Your own crossover point depends on your makeready waste, crew cost, plate cost and press availability, which is why it has to come from your own production data rather than a brochure.

Can inkjet presses print on newsprint?

Yes. Production inkjet web presses used for newspapers run on paper as light as 42 to 45 gsm, at speeds between 180 and 225 metres a minute in recent European installations. Paper weight is no longer the limit it was ten years ago.

What does a printer need in order to run offset and digital side by side?

Three things. Post calculation per job, so you know the real cost on each technology. One production schedule covering both lines, so commercial work and newspaper deadlines stop competing for the same machine. And a publishing and insert calendar that handles multiple versions without manual rework. All three sit in the Print MIS/ERP, not in the press.

Which European newspaper printers have added digital presses?

Publicly announced examples include Amedia Trykk and Polaris Trykk in Norway, Acropolis Printers Hellas in Greece, Miller Newsprint in Malta, Eucles Daily and Digitaprint in France, and KP Services in Jersey. The pattern is consistent: digital added for short runs, versioned editions, remote same day printing and non newspaper work, with offset kept for volume.

Want to dig deeper? Here are the sources