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Think of magazine printing and you'd be forgiven for picturing high-profile glossy titles such as Vogue, FHM or The Economist rolling off the web presses at big-name printers such as Polestar or St Ives in runs reaching the hundreds of thousands. But the reality for most of the estimated 9,000 titles in the UK is somewhat different. After all, as one printer remarked recently, if two blokes talk about something in a pub, chances are there'll be a magazine about it. Niche magazines abound, from in-house employee titles to business-to-business (B2B) magazines and publications catering to every special interest imaginable. Production-wise, the answer for most of these magazines is to go sheetfed.

According to the Waste Resources Action Programme (Wrap), around 90% of the 5,000 plus B2B magazines in the UK are printed sheetfed. And, three out of 10 of the 3,300 or so consumer magazines use the process. There are a number of reasons to choose sheetfed over web or gravure, but the main one is cost. For short-run magazines, it’s far too expensive to set up a giant web or gravure press for a few thousand copies, which explains why so many B2B titles are printed sheetfed. Tony Jones, chief executive of South Wales sheetfed magazine company Pensord, says his company will print anything from a few thousand copies up to around 30,000. If you go much above that level then web tends to be cheaper per unit, he says.

Paper costs are also a factor, as sheetfed printing produces less waste than web, argues Tony Stokes, chief executive and founder of north London-based B2 firm The Magazine Printing Company (MPC), which produces niche magazines. He believes rising paper costs could tip the balance between going web or sheetfed. Publishers are looking critically at their print runs and bringing them down, which suits sheetfed printers, he says.

Interestingly, Stokes says he insists his firm buys paper on behalf of its clients. Whereas clients for web printers will often choose to procure the paper themselves, which Stokes argues increases MPC’s efficiency and reduces cost. It is also indicative of the way specialist sheetfed magazine printers cater to the less specialist buyers they are likely to deal with. We supply all paper and will only work that way in order to keep our administration and efficiency levels high, he says. Web chaps rely on the customer supplying a lot, which in turn requires lots of space and handling.

The changing landscape of UK print is also thought to be favouring sheetfed printers. In the web sector, after years marked by an almighty price war and a series of high-profile closures, prices appear to be stabilising and even rising as the gap between capacity and demand closes.

Client shift
According to Stokes, this trend will push up the minimum run length a web printer will accept and push clients towards sheetfed. Meanwhile, the sheetfed segment is awash with overcapacity. Pensord’s Jones says: There are many struggling printers that are very aggressive with their pricing. These may not be specialist magazine printers, but in cost terms they are likely to be attractive. However, magazine printers believe their business model of regular work should make their companies more stable than a cut-price generalist whose main source of income is ad-hoc work.

Indeed, buyers are spoilt for choice when it comes to sheetfed magazine printers. Alongside established companies such as MPC, Pensord or Buxton Press in Derbyshire, an increasing number of general commercial printers, such as Worcester-based B1 printer Goodman Baylis, are setting up sheetfed magazine sales teams. Others, such as Stones the Printers in Oxfordshire, part of the Goodhead Group, and B1 site Wyndeham Grange, which specialises in print runs of around 10,000, are part of larger groups.

But cost and stability aren’t the only factors. Some clients, Jones says, choose sheetfed purely for its specific production qualities. Sheetfed printing does not tie a publication into any given cut-off, so the flexibility to produce different formats of magazine is much greater. And although the smaller web presses will produce 16pp or 8pp sections, these are also easily catered to by B1 or B2 presses, making paginations easier to adapt than if the magazine was being printed on the more common 32pp or 40pp presses. Finally, the lower speed of sheetfed presses lends itself to high-quality work and a wider variety of substrates.

MPC’s Stokes, however, does not buy into the idea that sheetfed printing is substantially better quality than web printing, at least in the eyes of the readers. I don’t believe this is an issue any more, he says. I am continually amazed at the quality web achieves. That is, unless one gets out the eye-glass, but I am referring to the end user’s perception.

Unlike many of their general commercial printing counterparts, sheetfed magazine printers are facing the future with optimism. Jones says despite the current credit crunch, which is affecting advertising revenue and pagination, the overall picture is positive, not least because the demands of customers are tipping the market in favour of sheetfed. Ever-increasing specialisation of niche titles is driving continuing organic market growth with relatively low print runs, he says. There are low barriers to entry for publishers and they have the ability to command high advertising premiums. This market dynamic is spot-on for printers such as us.