New York Daily News just put $150 million into an upgrade of its printing operations. Insanity? No one knows.
What we do know is the paper’s owner, real estate billionaire Mortimer Zuckerman, can probably afford it. We also know it takes money to make moeny, and that’s precisely what Zuckerman intends to see happen.
According to The New York Times:
The new presses are more cost-efficient and provide an improved printing quality that appeals to advertisers. The Daily News hopes the look will lure readers, too. And there is enough excess capacity to print other papers, a prospect The Daily News is exploring.
Aesthetically, the results are impressive: the color photographs and graphics are as good as anything on newsprint, and the pages are crisp, without the smudges and pinholes typically found around the borders of newspapers. As important as that can be to readers, it may matter more to advertisers — and papers generally charge more for color than black-and-white ads.
It sounds like a solid investment to me, but I’m not a media analyst (I just play one on the Internet).
