Southwest Offset is working with Ohio printer Freeport Press and Little Rock, Arkansas-based Democrat Printing & Lithography for the 32-city launch of Help Me Rent magazine, which is aimed at home and apartment renters and landlords.

Southwest began as a printer of regional editions of national and global newspapers such as the New York Times, USA Today and the Financial Times, and executive VP Jennifer McDonald said the idea for the new partnership came out the company's success as a regional newspaper printer.

"Originally Help Me Rent was planning to be a regional magazine, but I figured why don't we take what we do on the cold-set side with newspapers and take that over to the heat-set side with this magazine," she told PrintWeek. "We came up with a group of printers that have a very similar process and technology, so for all extensive purposes, it's like dealing with one printer even though we're based in different regions."

McDonald added the trend of regional printers banding together to take advantage of these national opportunities seems to be growing as these companies look to better compete with national printers with multiple printing sites.

"Our cold-set is actually very busy with both national publications as well as some of these local titles," she said. "But on the heat-set side, it's a bit more challenging because there's a lot more competition out there, which is one of the reasons why I wanted to take us into another area."

Helping to driving this trend is a host of new software solutions that make it easier to insert local content into national print outlets.

Help Me Rent, for example, has introduced "the print button" that allows classified advertisements to be auto-uploaded directly into the right regional edition.

Though its main business has always been periodicals, McDonald said Southwest Offset has been looking to expand both with this new initiative as well as a move into new markets such as catalogs. "Overall the catalog market has been down, but we've seen growth in that because we basically started from nothing," she added.

As for the bigger picture, McDonald said the rising cost of paper is forcing some tough choices for periodical printers. "There are times when we try to protect our customers as much as possible by absorbing it, but it gets to the point, unfortunately, where you have to pass it on," she noted. "But all the other printers in town are doing that, so we're not at a disadvantage."