There is no end to the exciting developments in print, witness the successes of two of India's largest publishers.

Contributions from ABP's Snehasis Chanda Roy and Bennett, Coleman & Co's Sanat Hazra brought a note of positivity to last month's World Publishing Expo.

Technical and production director of the Times of India Sanat Hazra spoke of the importance of reducing production costs - "do it with a scalpel, piece by piece, not an axe" - and of the team involvement in coming up with new ideas across all departments.

And while associate vice-president of manufacturing of ABP Snehasis Chanda Roy said their transformation has not happened overnight - "we started with the simple flap and with experimentation and process of continuous improvement, we have developed wonderful ideas and treatments" - there has been no shortage of advertisers to pay for their "wonderful innovations".

Hazra: cut costs with 'scalpel, not axe'

Sanat Hazra, who spent 14 years at the New York Times before returning to the Times of India in 2008, told how important print is for publisher Bennett, Coleman & Co.

"We will keep creating the newspaper - 80 per cent of our revenue comes from print and digital is struggling. We look at print and digital, not one or the other.

Circulation is growing - local languages continue to grow as does literacy - while advertising spend in the newspaper brings in 40 per cent of revenue.

India has 1.2 billion people, 82,000 registered newspapers, and with literacy now at 74 per cent - compared to 20 per cent for internet literacy - the plan to reach 100 per cent by 2060.

"We have to manage the short term to eat long term," he said. "The guiding principle is More, Better, Less:

• "More is innovation - absolutely vital
• "Better is to build a better brand and customer base.
• "Less is cutting costs to boost the bottom line.

"Innovation is creating new value, innovating is part of our culture, to create an environment fostering ideas

"We looked at how long the readers would spend on reading the newspaper - 30 minutes, an hour - then we looked at the cost and slowly, slowly we worked it out.

"We played with pencils and paper and screens and said 'let's all create something' and we eventually came up with more than 100 ideas to explore.

"This is a very good platform, and excited each and everyone in the company, editorial advertising and even distribution people, important in maintaining the viability of the product all the way to the customer."

Says Hazra, "You can see the result - in 2011, we had 21 different innovations and since then we have had waves of new ideas, each year and every year, at different times and on different days, we have maintained that metrics, that result.

"We have different filters that we take our innovation processes through. Some ideas work, and some don't - we talk to advertisers to do it together and get all departments involved, even distribution.

One of the secrets of success, he said, is getting out to meet customers while working on an innovation. "We keep a very close eye on our readers and our team, seeing what will work and what won't, who is working on what. We love the crazy ideas people."

One example of innovation is the gluing system on the press - "we found one system we liked in Europe but it cost 60,000 Euro each and we needed 27, and this we could not afford.

"The boss said find something else or this idea is not viable, so we developed our own to keep costs down, and then we innovated ideas on how to use it.

"Glueing on an offset press has to be very fast and we are now on our third generation system, having started in 2008."

Hazra told of experiments with different coldset inks and different papers: It's not all about money, it is also about space, with dryers needed for heatset inks," he said.

"We have used flaps, gatefolds and what we called butterfly gatefolds - which some advertisers have used and liked but which don't work all the time - the issue is always how advertisers use the innovations for different purposes.

"Now we say, what else can we do with this?"

A recent example using the glueing system was when the paper gave plant seeds away, including them in a strip on the bottom right hand of the spread called Plantation through newspaper (pictured) and encouraged readers to plant them. "This was our latest innovation in a small city and now the question is how do we do it on a national level. We might look at herbs or lemongrass next."

Hazra says print is the only media where you can use four out of five senses - all but taste. "Maybe one day we will have an edible newspaper - my boss is asking for it," he says.

"Newspapers have a low entry point cost, providing high value. There is very often five or six pages of glueing on our product today, a big challenge but we do it by design."

In India and South-East Asian markets, The Times of India sees it as very important to:

• invest in growth, be proactive and stay close to your customer;
• focus on your people, one of the toughest challenges the publishing industry is facing today;
• focus on your brand, brand building can be very hard to do but all depends on knowing who is your customer and why others are not with us;
• invest in quality in all products;
• naming the new innovation creates internal excitement, very important; and
• do good in your organisation.

Hazra said The Times of India has more than 30 plants, with Bennett, Coleman & Co in a further 31 joint partnerships all over India.

Bringing production costs down is vital: "Reduce costs with a scalpel, not an axe - take it piece by piece, not a big chop with an axe, planning next year's budgets and planning for growth as well.

"We have several groups whose role is to cut costs, we take it very seriously and we have done a whole bunch of stuff.

"For example a 7.3 per cent cut in newsprint, our largest cost factor, over the past six or seven years, has saved US$80 million annually.

"Utilities account for 30-35 per cent each year and we made a pledge to save a million dollars every year by reducing the cost of utilities, and have saved $3 million annually on inks, plates and other consumables.

"Huge savings are coming out of this programme each year."

Of readership strategies, he added, "A very important project for us is to start them young and to make sure the newspaper is there first thing in the morning, so customers do not reach for their mobiles but for the newspaper at the door."

ABP transformation and how we do it

A leading publisher in the Indian market - with leading Bengali language newspaper Anandabazaar, young people's newspaper Ebela and several magazines and additional publications, plus English language newspaper The Telegraph - ABP is "a flexible high speed media company", according to Snehasis Chanda Roy.

"The advantage of print is that you can have it in your hand and share it with others, and this is what happens in India, it passes from hand to hand. But we are in a transformative period, and have produced many exciting developments, continually experimenting.

Roy told of innovations with sheet sizes, inks and designs: "We need to have tabloid and broadsheet and have now added large tabloids - not a variable cut-off - which is very successful and great for special events.

"We can do almost anything a customer wants, with time and experimentation - we can offer panorama, pseudo panorama and super panorama, while reverse panorama is very popular, along with inserts and outsert. The sheet can be flap-glued, double flap, index jut-out, French window, centreline butterfly."

Processes include coldset, heatset, UV curing, dry offset, digital inkjet, UV varnishing and combinations of these: "In our page designs, we have used every possible bit of white space at times, we have used all types of stock and substrates, including translucent jackets,

Offline insertion offers many opportunities as does 3D and glasses, many choices of different inks in CMYK (pictured), colours that change with light, and inks with scents, including a mosquito repellent-scented ink, have been used across ABP publications.

"And all these clever ideas and experiments have boosted readership, our media gets shared a lot and readership looks very promising," he says. "People love to open our newspapers and see what we have done today, our photograph and our design...

He agreed with Sanat Hazra on the importance of glueing systems. "Our glue system is a blessing - we can put it everywhere on the presses, and we offer online inkjet.

"We have gone from black and white, low quality media to full colour high quality offerings, with very good pre-press and post press and enhanced newspaper marketing.

"This had not happened overnight, but we have developed wonderful ideas and treatments and found advertisers to pay for our innovations. It all takes time and a huge learning curve in growth of knowledge in our team."

-Maggie Coleman

Pictured: Sanat Hazra (top) and Snehasis Chanda Roy (above) with samples from their presentations