The Death of Flexography?

[Dave Hughes]

In the face of a challenging media landscape, Frank Romano examines the closure of the Providence Journal's Rhode Island printing facility and the broader implications of shrinking print runs on the newspaper industry.


https://d3a577syzx0or3.cloudfront.net/video/2024-12-frank-providence.mp4

You can watch more videos from Frank Romano here: What They Th!nk - Frank Romano

[Geoffrey Quadland]

I think there must be more to it than that. For starters, if the flexo press has been working from 1987 to 2024, it is 37 years old. It is probably technologically out of date, as well as being worn out.

Flexo printing for newspapers may now be history, but for packaging it is still going strong. Walk into any grocery store and look around you.....most of the packaging there, including folding cartons, paper packaging and plastic packaging, is flexo printed.

Their plate supplier may be ceasing to make that particular plate, but I'm sure there are other plate suppliers whose plates they could use. If they used an oddball plate thickness, they might have had to modify the plate cylinders of the press to take a different thickness of plate, but that is not a big issue, (unless they decided they didn't want to spend money keeping an obsolete press running).

Another issue might be that the current newspaper press manufacturers don't want the upfront cost of designing and manufacturing one flexo press for one customer.

Just my thoughts, from a retired person who spent most of my printing career in flexo, but with letterpress, offset litho and gravure thrown in too.