"What will happen to West Ferry?" is an oft-posed question in these parts. This week we learned something of Northern & Shell's plans for reinvestment for Express Newspapers, but the mists are yet to clear over precisely where those new KBA presses will be located.
Thus, the West Ferry future question remains unanswered. The smart money says Richard Desmond will relocate his printworks to a site somewhere north of the M25, let's call it Luton, in a Broxbourne-esque move.
Desmond is something of a money magnet, worth the best part of £1bn according to the latest Sunday Times Rich List, and I have 10p that says a few more millions will be heading his way when he leaves the Docklands site. Last time I looked the land that West Ferry currently sits upon was listed as one of the British Waterways Board's most valuable assets. The net book value of leasehold land and buildings in the latest West Ferry accounts is shown as £24.5m.
And let's face it, he is hardly the sort of chap who would be investing this stated £100m on "super new colour presses" if he didn't think there'd be a return on it.
I was, however, intrigued by this sentence in the Daily Express story announcing the group's spend: "The scheme will eventually allow the group to add presses capable of producing its magazines, including OK!, New and Star in-house." I'm sure Prinovis and Polestar are loving the sound of that, not.
This did cause me to have an immediate flashback to 15 years ago, pretty much to the day, when on the eve of Drupa 1995 we ran a front page story saying that Northern & Shell "planned to become the first major magazine publisher to print its titles at its own heatset printing plant". Déjà vu or what? I wonder if Desmond has dusted off that old report by Julie Squire and Taggart Aston?
It's going to be fascinating to see whether this part of the plan comes to fruition. By implication it would involve additional heatset kit, as opposed to using hybrid newspaper presses to print both newspapers and magazines. Looking at the heatset option, an inplant facility for printing magazines sounds mighty expensive to me.
The hybrid solution would potentially make more sense, but while it's theoretically possible has anyone managed to successfully pull off this type of production yet? Answers on a postcard, please, from the press manufacturers.
News International must have looked long and hard at this possibility when planning its mammoth print reinvestment. That they didn't ultimately pursue the route of using spare daytime print capacity to print their own magazines and supplements says a lot.
