I'm wondering if Axel Springer is providing some clues to the likely future shape of successful newspaper printing operations. It was super-interesting to visit the German publisher and printer's Ahrensburg production facility. For a start, it's busy printing coldset colour commercial products during the day for external clients, and the results were impressive. The real purpose of the visit was to see how the company has progressed with its hybrid inkjet printing system, using Kodak Prosper S30 heads on conventional Manroland Colorman newspaper presses. And it was even more super-interesting to learn that Springer now plans to purchase a further 25 of these heads so it can roll-out this hybrid print option across the whole country – even at its contract printing partners. Springer has been able to test the waters by running competitions and promotions in its own title Bild, using variable inkjet data, instead of having to print separate competition tickets and inserts. In doing so it has also effectively highlighted the potential of this sort of hybrid promotion to its advertiser universe, with one of the beauties being that variable inkjet can be used by smaller, regional advertisers who wouldn't have the budget or requirement for a national campaign – the local bakery, for instance. I was interested to know how the details of the contract print installs would be worked out, and it seems likely that Axel Springer will have exclusive use of the "prime time" slot, and some sort of agreement that its inkjet heads won't be used by direct competitors. There's also a cross-media aspect to the three legs that will be used to measure the ROI of the project, according to Tobias Kuhn, general manager at Bild Ost. The first leg is, naturally enough, money from additional advertising and promotional tie-ins. The second involves additional revenue from copy sales, due to the high-profile games producing a marked peak in sales. And the third leg involves a planned Bild "Premium Club" which is an online community. However, buying a paper will be linked with certain added-value content and offers. Kuhn notes that if occasional readers "buy just one or two more copies because of it, we will see some nice payback at the end of the year." So here we have a hybrid print application that offers a transition between old and new technology, while making newspaper production more competitive and more interesting to both advertisers and readers. Hold the front page.