The price of paper feels like a mundane thing to worry about, even for those of us still employed by an industry where the price of paper can suddenly start to matter a great deal when it’s going up.
It is not in Reach’s interest to downplay cost challenges at a time when a pay dispute with UK staff looks set to lead to strike action by journalists at the end of August. But this is a real problem. Ó Muilleoir, a former Sinn Féin minister for finance at Stormont, has been “at this game long time”, he added, but this was the steepest six-monthly hike he could recall. “Crisis, what crisis?” the tweet began.
The jumping cost of both newsprint and the coated paper types used by magazines is, on one level, a straightforward consequence of the rocketing energy costs now affecting all industries. Some large producers have converted old newsprint mills to the production of packaging paper, serving buoyant ecommerce customers instead, and they haven’t looked back. But if paper producers are no longer enthusiastic about supplying the printing industry, this inevitably leaves the print industry in something of a tight spot.