Next year, Jack Knadjian gets to do what he loves most: sail his boat... and print newspapers digitally.

There are challenges - apart from the shoals and reefs of the Channel Islands coast - but he is fortunate in the support of an employer that understands the need for lateral thinking in building a new business model for printed papers.

At WAN-Ifra's World Publishing Expo in Hamburg this week, global chief executive Jeff Clarke - he's the one with the business card that looks like a bit of 35mm film - was standing behind Knadjian both physically and metaphorically. Kodak has become the major partner in a new business which solves the delivery problems of the UK dailies in a niche market on the French coast, and also starts a bright new chapter for the local publisher, currently struggling - and likely failing even for its own parochial market - to meet demand on an ageing Goss Urbanite press.

The story has been told elsewhere and on GXpress: Kodak will partner UK-owned Guiton to print full-colour copies of the Jersey Evening Post, plus the 11-strong mixed bag of UK dailies read regularly by expats and tourist visitors to the island and nearby Guernsey.

Knadjian - semi-retired and a keen yachtsman - even gets to set up a new freight ferry between the two.

Thus is solved:

-the problem of reliably delivering UK (and later French and international) newspapers to a destination where air links are cut off by fog or bad weather for perhaps 20 days a year;

-the issue for the Jersey Evening Post of how to produce colourful newspapers which are attractive to readers and advertisers, when dwindling circulations discourage major investment, certainly in conventional technology;

-how to break the logjam that besets digital newspaper press manufacturers by demonstrating a cooperative model for publishers.

Jersey is one of a group of islands with a long connection with the UK, but 16 km off the French coast; it's also a location favoured with advantageous tax laws, although Kodak says that has nothing to do with their part in the project.

Importantly, however, it is a place where 17,000 copies of the local paper are sold daily, plus as many again of the London dailies. These are a mix of tabloid, broadsheet and Berliner formats with varying and sometimes very substantial pagination - such as the weekend edition of London's Daily Telegraph currently printed at Rupert Murdoch's Newsprinters in Broxbourne - and print orders as small as 300 copies.

"You couldn't do it any other way, but inkjet doesn't care about the format or the size," says Knadjian, who has spent the last dozen years evangelizing his passion for the process and the opportunity it creates.

The project gets under way in the first quarter of 2016, having taken two years to put together, and will create 29 new jobs while displacing eight people involved with the old press. It also opens new vistas of geo-targetted advertising and marketing for a publisher - Guiton shares the same ownership as the Wolverhampton Express & Star - facing the same challenges of competition from mobile and tablet editions.

More importantly, it shows the willingness of a vendor - credit here to Kodak and Jeff Clarke - to "put its money where it mouth is" in underwriting a cooperative application of the technology: "No one publisher has enough volume to do something like this themselves," Knadjian says.

From a couple of isolated islands in the English Channel to the immediate circulation area of GXpress Magazine in India, southeast Asia and Australasia, it's easy to see geo-and demographic comparisons - some of these "islands" surrounded by sand.

Touring other vendors in this space around the Hamburg show, the focus seemed to closely on product differentiation than on how to make digital newspaper printing work while the undoubted window of opportunity is still open.

Kodak says it is interested in other "deep joint ventures" and - technology issues apart - may steal a march on its competition through its flexibility and imagination.

Peter Coleman