Don’t let a generation turn its back on print

Last year, I wrote a column for ProPrint saying the printing industry had done a poor job of promoting itself as a viable career option for talented young people. I still believe that. And after attending the recent JPE Industry Review Night, it seems to me that the organisation with an official mandate to represent youth in the industry has done no favours in fostering an environment to attract talented young people to print.

What’s worse, some of the negative assessments being made on the night would do little to encourage anything other than a swift exit from the room, then the industry as whole.

Let me start by saying I am a paid-up member of the JPE. Far from wanting to snipe at them from the sidelines, I will put my money where my mouth is and apply to be a member of the committee so that I can try and exert this change that I demand. The JPE and its committee have worked hard in an industrial environment where youth is seen as a threat, not something to be nurtured. The chips are stacked against them.

But a mid-week dinner event in a suburban RSL club? Where the average age was 40? Where one of the speakers (albeit highly informative) was an economic expert in his 50s or 60s? This borderline yawn fest is hardly going to have intelligent young people queuing up.

I venerate the people who laid the platform in this industry, but in my mind, a JPE event should be positive and fun. The sad thing about the review night was that it was neither, in setting and in content. I would love to see the JPE reset the mould and cater events with the target audience in mind.

One of the evening’s speakers, Hagop Tchamkertenian, who is national manager for policy and government affairs for PIAA, presented a raft of empirical evidence to tell us what we, depressingly, already know: that the industry is in decline. It’s hard to argue with those empirical numbers. The positive spin on this is that we are “an industry in transition”, but I’m not convinced by two of Hagop’s major recommendations. One, that firms should remove the words ‘print’, ‘press’, ‘web’ or anything print-related from their branding (because that’s what Snap did), and two, that printers should be moving into 3D printing.

Let me deal with the latter first: 3D printing is not actually printing; it is replicating. While the technology is cool and impressive, there is no reason why anyone other than NASA has an immediate need for this technology. If you need a shifting spanner, you go to Bunnings and buy a fully functioning shifter for a reasonable cost. You don’t go to a printer to replicate an inferior spanner out of composite material at an extremely high cost.

I take more serious issue with removing the word ‘print’ and ‘press’ from our branding. What happened to solidarity? What happened to believing in our product and providing a good service to our clients? While I’m all for diversification and providing holistic closed-loop marketing solutions for our customers, I think we need to get the pride back into what we do.

Hollow window dressing around company names is a long way from providing a fix to the current woes of overcapacity and the economic climate. Using some marketing buzzword in a company title instead of ‘print’ seems like waving a white flag. Printing is at the heart of what we do. If we are ashamed of what this industry is built on, what hope do we have? 

Adam Newman is a business development manager at Ferag Australia

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