Pressing Concerns: Behind the Covers of Periodical Printing

Meet the Printers

McConkey is one of eight kids who grew up with AT Publishing & Printing, established by her father in Anchorage in 1963. Four of them still work there; her brother Andy Martone became president in 2009 when their father retired at age 92.

The print shop in South Anchorage produces a couple of magazines that McChesney oversees at the Frontiersman bullpen off Palmer-Wasilla Highway: Valley Living and Alaska Native Quarterly. The Frontiersman plant is geared for newsprint, so it contracts with AT Publishing & Printing for small-format, glossy publications.

The Frontiersman uses a Goss Community press, the biggest web-fed rig in Southcentral. “Web” refers to a continuous roll of paper that snakes through the machine. “In the grand scheme of things, it’s not an enormous facility, but it serves our in-house needs and our clients’ needs very well,” McChesney says.

The press runs about four days per week, cranking out color publications up to forty pages. In addition to its twice-weekly newspaper and the ADN contract, the Frontiersman prints nine other titles, from The Arctic Sounder and The Bristol Bay Times (both Binkley properties) to The North Star Catholic and Alaska Korean Community News. Commercial, government, and nonprofit clients also hire the press for various listings, programs, guides, and brochures.

AT Publishing & Printing runs rolls of paper through a Heidelberg press which can also handle sheet-fed glossy papers as well as matte or uncoated. The shop also has the largest twelve-color press in Alaska. Anchorage Concert Association programs and Alaska State Fair guides come from those presses, as well as various newsletters and state government reports.

Annual reports for Alaska Native corporations keep the presses at PIP running double shifts in springtime. The Anchorage franchise of the national “postal instant print” chain specializes in large-volume mailings but has the capability to make anything from business cards to bus wraps.

“Diversity within our products keeps us very, very strong. There’s always something we’re able to sell and always something we’re able to do for all of these different businesses,” says PIP sales rep Amy Guse.

PIP could probably manage a run of 13,000 monthly copies of Alaska Business, she estimates, but not for a satisfactory price. Each page takes time, and time is money.

Between the Covers

The minute-by-minute media milieu still has room for stories told at a weekly, monthly, or quarterly pace.

McChesney appreciates the time to dig deeper. “Our reporters may spend anywhere from a few days to a few weeks on a story, so they will get information that’s a little broader in scope, and we can complement that with photography,” he says. The internet is great for sharing worldwide, but McChesney sees the periodical as the first take on local history.

Alaska stories can also be told through the lens of food. Customers at Metro Cooks or Middle Way Café in Anchorage, The Classic Cook in Homer, or Rainbow Foods in Juneau may have seen copies of Edible Alaska. Other parts of the country have their own “Edible” magazines; Edible Alaska licenses the name from the company Edible Communities, but the content is locally driven. “Everything we do is our own choice,” says Amy O’Neill Houck, co-owner of the magazine with Jeremy Pataky. “[Edible Communities] provides opportunities for networking and support as well as the branding.”

From their home base in Anchorage, Houck and Pataky publish stories about the intersection of food and all aspects of life written by paid freelance writers selected by Edible Alaska, plus some material submitted on spec.

Community submissions are welcome in the family of magazines published by the local branch of Wisconsin-based Best Version Media (BVM). Janna Hardy, the BVM market manager in Anchorage, recalls an author who pitched a series about ethnic grocery stores. “She wanted to do that on her own, and she submitted it to us, and we put it in wherever we have content space,” Hardy says.

BVM titles include South Anchorage Hillside Living, North De Armoun Living, Southside Neighbors, Coastal Trail Neighbors, and Eagle River Living. Not sold in stores, these are mailed to homes in the titular neighborhoods every other month. “Our business model is to microtarget homeowners in specific areas,” Hardy explains. “Best Version Media goes in and does whatever they do to find the metrics for homeowners that have a certain home value.”

That way, advertisers have greater assurance of appearing in front of high-end eyeballs, and readers get a kick out of seeing hyper-local content. Hardy says, “When we put someone that lives in the actual demographic on the cover, and people know and have seen them or heard about them, that is the draw to our publications. When you see your friend, it’s like, ‘Oh, what’s going on with Billy?’ They want to read it.”

Sheets and Webs

The Anchorage office of WCP Solutions is the main paper supplier for local presses, both cut into sheets and, for web presses, rolls that might weigh up to a ton.

McChesney figures the Goss Community press consumes 450 to 500 rolls per year. At that rate, he says, “When you turn it on then you turn it off, that’s fifty copies right there,” so some jobs are indeed too small.

Unlike newspapers, magazines use lightweight papers for interior “text” pages and thicker papers for covers, printed separately and then collated. The recycled heavy matte covers of Edible Alaska are sturdy like a proper book. Houck says, “Readers tell us they really like picking up the magazine. They like how it feels in their hand, and they like flipping through it. They think it’s warm and inviting.” High-quality paper elevates the title, she says, so her Edible Communities counterparts strive for that standard.

Publications used to have a wider selection of fancy papers. Mike Vania, general manager and sales manger of PIP in Anchorage, has seen colored papers disappear over the last thirty years. “Everything is printed color now (the majority of it), so that narrows your paper [choice]. Generally speaking, 98 percent of paper is white,” he says. “That works out well for the mills; they narrowed their lines, so it makes it easier on them as well.”

Paper mills adjusted further during the COVID-19 pandemic, when they ramped up production of wipes and towels. Paper for printing was scarce for a time, and afterward the types of papers narrowed. But printers have tricks to keep the product vibrant. “You keep the same paper, but the technology puts different effects in the printing process. That can give you raised lettering and foil lettering and texture,” Vania says. With a laugh, he adds, “If money’s no object, you can do amazing things on paper!”

Press and Ink

The oldest printing method is known as letterpress, or individual engravings set in a bed. McConkey says AT Publishing & Printing keeps letterpress equipment around for die embossing.

A more modern method uses metal plates with graphics etched into them. Martone recalls the photochemical process used as recently as twenty years ago. “The old ways, the plates you made for the printing press were done by film. You shot film and then burned a plate. Now it’s all computer to plate,” he says. The process is less messy, but aluminum plates are still involved, one for each signature of paper (which might contain multiple pages). Once pressed, the plates are sent to a recycler; they can’t be reused onsite.

In a web press, the plates don’t touch the paper directly. They contact an intermediate roller, which transfers the image, a process called offset printing. Furthermore, the ink could be cold-set, soaking into paper while the solvent evaporates (like a pen or marker), or heat-set, where a dryer bakes ink into the paper. Alaska Business uses heat-set inks.

“Heat-set web offset printing adds speed and efficiency to the technique, making it effective for high-volume press runs,” explains the website of Oregon-based printer Journal Graphics. “Large jobs that would take days to complete by any other printing method can be completed within hours. Plus, no drying time is required for the ink before starting the bindery phase of production.”

The alternative to web press is sheet press, applying ink to one paper at a time just like Johannes Gutenberg and Benjamin Franklin did. And instead of offset printing, no physical contact is necessary for digital printers.

PIP runs an HP Indigo, which dispenses with aluminum plates by directly adhering ElectroInk in four colors: cyan, magenta, yellow, and key (i.e., black). The rig has been in use for almost twenty years, and last year PIP upgraded its digital game with a Fujifilm J Press. The truck-sized machine is an inkjet, improved in quality compared to desktop office printers. Guse says Anchorage is an early adopter of the J Press among PIP shops, and it’s useful for bigger sheets compared to the Indigo.

“It gives us the capabilities of doing some print work that we hadn’t been able to do before,” adds Vania, citing 18-by-24-inch posters as an example. “It’s got its niche. It’s not the end-all, be-all, but it’s a great addition to our team.”

Impressive as the equipment is, Vania reserves praise for his skilled staff. “Printing is a problem for a lot of our customers; they have to get their printing done, and a lot of them really don’t know the best way to do it,” he says. “So we’re the experts on solving their printing needs.”

Holding It Together

Another new investment at the Anchorage PIP shop last year was an automated binder for perfect-bound jobs. Vania explains, “It’s kind of the same machinery, but they did the advancements where they changed it where it can produce three times as many books in the same hour as before.”

For a perfect example of perfect binding, look no further than Alaska Business. Pages are glued together with a squared-off, dimensional spine. The alternative is “saddle stitch,” which simply refers to this magazine’s inaugural format: folded signatures with staples in the crease. For most commercial jobs, staples are satisfactory, and perfect is the enemy of “good enough.”

Martone says, “The upgrade to perfect-bound equipment is pretty expensive, and the market is pretty small up here. We do have a couple perfect binders, but they’re not efficient with long runs. They’re more like shorter runs.”

Staying current with technology is a never-ending chase, Vania says, recalling when an office fax machine was a stunning addition. “It takes a lot of effort, a lot of money. You have to be able to have the revenue stream to be able to keep up with it,” he says.

In a small market, large overhead costs can be discouraging. “I can’t imagine anyone investing in a printing company today,” says Martone. For shops as well established as his family’s, though, “We’re happy to see a lot of this work coming back, that we’re competitive enough to keep it in Alaska.”

A Frontier Too Far

Magazines are not among the work returning, at least not yet. The BVM titles, for instance, are printed closer to headquarters in Wisconsin, according to Hardy. Alaska Life Publishing—the Anchorage-based publisher of Alaska Home, Alaska Parent, and Alaska Bride & Groom—looks to Oregon for Journal Graphics’ heatset web press. Edible Alaska is printed in Colorado.

Houck says, “We would love to print in Alaska. At this point, we haven’t found a capacity to print the right kind of paper that we want, the perfect binding, and the quantity, et cetera.”

McConkey strives to compete for magazine jobs. “We would look at investing [in perfect bind] if we knew that there was enough workload to justify it,” she says. However, “Right now, I think we do very well with all our saddle stitch publications.”

Guse agrees. “Magazines are just not cost effective with the type of presses that we have for those customers. Those are web-press products in such huge, huge quantities and page counts,” she says.

Commercial customers have adjusted their printing needs over the years. “They used to order in large amounts. You would order a year’s supply of brochures, whatever. Everything was big volume because you could bring your printing price down,” Vania recalls. “Traditionally, large orders were, let’s say, 20,000 brochures at a time. Now they’re ordering 500 at a whack, but they’re constantly changing up the messaging on that. Sure, they spend more money on it, but the return on investment on those pieces is much higher.”

Touch of Paper

Why bother with printed periodicals at all? That’s a question Hardy says she’s gotten from recipients of her mass-mailed magazines. “I had a couple people say, ‘I don’t believe in print anymore. You’re killing trees,’ or something like that,” she says. “But most people, because of the local content and celebrating people in their neighborhoods, they really appreciate it. I get so many good emails.”

Hardy also heard from a historic archive organization that appreciates the paper record. “All of my magazines are being archived because, they said, this is a snapshot in time of our community,” she says.

Paper is permanent in a way digital content isn’t. McChesney says, “While we’re doing things like public notice and foreclosure listings and bankruptcies and what have you—when they are posted to a website, they’re vulnerable to hacking. Once it’s printed, it’s archived. You cannot go back and change that.”

That said, McChesney observes, “Our product is not paper; our product is information.”

Information published monthly or quarterly gives magazines a longer shelf life. Houck says Edible Alaska changes hands several times as readers pass it around. “People really like them as a physical object. We’ll get calls from people who want to complete their collections or get back issues,” she says.

The paperless future has not yet arrived. “Everybody thought that, with the internet, printing was gonna go by the wayside. That’s not been the case,” says Vania. “People still want to touch; they want to look at that piece. We have found that we do a different kind of printing, but our printing volume is still as strong as it’s ever been.”

Guse adds, “It’s increased.”

Whether mass mail or printed periodical, Vania says, “People still like that ink on paper, and it’s still got a place out there.”