I’m not really interested in any of the staffing issues or management costs. What I’m really interested in is how much it costs to print a big number of copies of roughly 40 pages of newsprint.
Does anyone know any rough (or possibly accurate) estimates?
It’s all dependent on the circulation. If it’s sufficiently large circulation (and cheap newsprint as so many of them are) you should be able to get it to fractions of a dollar per copy. Maybe quite a bit less.
Ah. I see you specify a ‘big number’ of copies. It still depends a great deal on the printer but it should be fairly cheap per-copy wherever you go.
I’d like an answer to this as well. A good example would be The Onion. They print a few million each week, what do you suppose the printing costs them? I know a lot of cities also have a Metro Free Daily which would probably be printing a million each day.
For a million each day (woof, the Washington Post doesn’t print that many) it would certainly be less than a dime each. Possibly less than a nickel.
Obviously a million is out of the question.
But what about 10000-15000 copies?
A quarter a copy? Fifty cents?
What grade of paper are you using? (Newsprint is more than one thing.) How much color work is involved? What dimensions are you planning?
There are a million variables that are crucial.
OK, let’s say cheapest or second cheapest newsprint.
No color work, all black and white.
Regular “tabloid-style” I’m told it’s called.
I used to work on a college newspaper that was approximately tabloid-sized, black and white and roughly 40 pages. So you might call the local college newspaper and ask them. If they don’t know, ask the name of their printer.
http://www.studentpress.org/nspa/forums/~296.html
Looks like 30-40 cents would be the most.
Xap is right that there are unresolved issues here.
Will it be color? If so on how many pages?
Will the cover be a heavier stock?
Will it be unbound (as many are) or saddle-stitched?
But I’d say off the top of my head you’re looking at $7K-$12K per issue. It wouldn’t be hard to make that up in ad revenue at 15,000 circulation. But of course you have the layout, design, editorial, marketing, distribution and overhead expenses to cover as well.
Black and White for sure.
The cover would be the same stock as the newsprint
And yes, it will be unbound.
Printing is only half the battle – delivery costs can be huge, too.
If you want to deliver to homes (a la “The Weekly Shopper”) costs can start rising exponentially.
I used to work for a local free paper (about 10 years ago) and made a trip down to the printing press a couple times to pick it up with a check. The circulation was 20K and it was 24 pages (pages 24 and 24 were full color) on newspaper print. The cost was $15K. I doubt it was the cheapest, but the paper had burned a couple bridges when it didn’t pay prior printers. (And this was one about 90 miles away too).