News

Here's what you have been doing on printweek.com in April:

Top 5 most-read stories

1. April's news on printweek.com has been dominated by the problems faced by Butler and Tanner (B&T) – the book printing firm which was bought by Media and Print Investments (MPI) last year. We have brought you several stories on this – two of which took our top two most-read slots, as well as the sixth. The most-read (with 4,002 views) being the latest announcement that all 287 staff at the Bristol site had been made redundant and the troubled company to be placed into voluntary liquidation.

2. Also making the headlines this month, some hopeful news for print giant Quebecor World . The firm, which is battling bankruptcy, won two major contracts with Wenner Media and McGraw-Hill.

3. April brought news of a possible £200m contract between Williams Lea and finance giant HBOS , which owns Halifax and Bank of Scotland. This is yet to be confirmed but printweek.com will keep readers informed of any developments.

4. This month printweek.com reported that, according to sources, RR Donnelley had appointed PricewaterhouseCoopers to advise on a sale of its Global Document Solutions (GDS) arm (formerly known as Astron). This comes three years after the firm paid £520m for Astron.

5. Lastly, the fifth most-read story in April, was news of the fire which ravaged Paragon Labels ' plant in Spalding, Lincolnshire. The blaze at the food packaging supplier's factory was blamed on an electrical fault. Fortunately, nobody was hurt during the incident and the firm has bounced back, with disruption to printing kept at a minimum.


Comments

"I just want to say to all my fellow ex-B&T colleagues, it has been a pleasure. Maybe this has given us the chance to move on to bigger and better things. We are worth more, let's go out and prove it!"

Natasha Porter on the news of 287 redundancies at B&T's Frome site.

"Having dealt with B&T a few years ago, I find it sad that that huge name will be no more. It was perhaps one of the best litho printers out there."

Patrick Curran on news of the B&T closure.

"I can remember all to well the dire state of the British printing industry prior to Margaret Thatcher introducing some common sense to our employment laws. Fleet Street was in terminal decline, the four major gravure plants were all loosing huge amounts of money, and the only modern web offset press in the country was at Carlisle web offset. Despite difficult trading, our printing industry has never been in better shape and for that we all owe a huge vote of thanks to News International and Margaret Thatcher."

Douglas Richardson comments on the end of an era as News International's iconic print site at Wapping printed its last newspaper.

"The pace of change of communications technologies that can impact print is increasing rapidly. Web 2.0 incorporates new terms that will become integral to the marketing mix: 'blogs, mashups, podcasting, RSS, social networking, widgets and wikis'. Some of these currently operate only in the B2C environment but they will soon impact B2B also. Marketers want solutions that work and, as an industry, we've got an undervalued medium called print."

W2P director Peter Lancaster on the dangers and opportunities of print's digital "gold rush".

"I feel obliged to mention my colleague James Parfitt from St Ives, Westerham, who completed the marathon in an even more impressive 3 hours 4 minutes. Apparently, if James Cracknell hadn't tripped him up, it would have been under the magic 3 hours..."