The Guardian Didn’t Digitise Print. It Automated It.
Dave Kirwan runs print production at The Guardian. Mike Hoy built the tools that changed how he does it.
Print isn’t dead. It’s just become a niche.
Print has been declared dead so many times that the headlines barely register anymore. Dave Kirwan has heard them all. As Production Director at The Guardian, he’s closer to reality than most.
“Print, especially quality newspapers, delivers to a very specific demographic and a very high-value demographic. It commands trust in a way that many other media do not. In these times, with everything becoming more difficult politically and globally, a trusted print brand is still filling a valuable niche,” says Dave Kirwan.
That trust is what has kept quality newspapers off the critical list while other print titles have buckled. The Guardian and others serve audiences that actively choose them. Advertisers — watch brands, food retailers, quality consumer goods — still find value in that association. The decline is real, Kirwan says, but the pace has slowed. The brutal early shifts, the collapse of classified advertising, and the disappearance of recruitment pages are largely done. What remains is more stable.
“There’s been a decline in print advertising, but the rate of decline has slowed. I think a lot of the major shifts have already happened. You’re not going to see much difference over the next five years; it will gradually reduce, but still deliver a good contribution,”
Dave Kirwan, Production Director, The Guardian
A recent collaboration with Tesco for a food magazine supplement shows how the Guardian is pushing print harder and more creatively. A three-quarter cover format blended advertising with editorial, trying, as Kirwan puts it, to make the best of both worlds. “It’s a long tail. It might be a niche now rather than the mainstream, but it’s definitely still there.”
Before the tools: chasing copy by hand
Behind the brand sits a production operation that, until recently, ran on systems Kirwan describes as “almost ancient.” Ad copy was tracked manually. Files were pushed from one workflow stage to the next by hand. Chasing advertisers for artwork meant emails, phone calls, and a lot of repetition.
Papermule’s AdDesk changed that. The platform automates the copy-chasing process — from initial contact with advertisers through to preflight checking and approval. Kirwan’s team now manages a process that previously ate significant resources with a fraction of the effort.
Mike Hoy, Papermule’s Managing Director, describes AdDesk as a content and communications hub, one that removes the human touch-points from a process that has historically depended on them.
“Have we identified the right person? Do they know what they’re sending? Is what they’re expecting to send going to match what we’re expecting to receive? Do I know who to call at five o’clock if I haven’t got the content? That approval process should be one click. If it’s anything more than that, then we’ve done our job wrong,”
Mike Hoy, Managing Director, Papermule
The contrast with generic project management tools, such as Monday.com and Asana, is stark, Hoy argues. Those platforms track tasks. They don’t track outcomes.
“If I’ve downloaded an email, saved a PDF, put it in a folder and then gone to Monday.com and marked the job as done, that relies on both hands coordinating. If I’ve taken a phone call or gone for a coffee, that process is broken. It involves humans, and it takes time. A thousand moments make up hours,” says Mike Hoy.
Headcount Down. Output the Same.
Kirwan won’t be drawn on specifics. But he doesn’t dodge the core point.
“The tangible improvement is costs. We’ve reduced headcount and achieved significant savings without affecting workflow or service to the business.”
For a lean production operation, this matters, especially as energy and paper costs rise and global instability increases scrutiny of operational expenses.
“All other costs are going up. The costs are always under scrutiny, especially right now. There's a high chance of price increases across the supply chain.”
The shift to AdDesk has moved his team toward a more monitoring-focused role. The dashboard provides a live view of where every piece of copy sits. Sales and editorial both have access. The manual intervention that once characterised the process has largely been replaced by exception management.
PlanDesk: the flat plan that shares itself
The second product in the Papermule suite — PlanDesk — handles flat planning and sits alongside AdDesk. Before its implementation at the Guardian, sharing a flat plan with editorial or sales meant generating a PDF and emailing it. Now it’s a live link.
“We share live flat plans now, which is something we couldn’t do before. You don’t need a bespoke application on a Windows-only computer. I keep telling editorial: you don’t need us to send it to you, you can just go to this link and see the live flat plan for yourself. We’re moving them towards that. Some departments use it more than others,” says Dave Kirwin.
Old habits die hard. Getting editorial teams to pull information rather than wait for it to be pushed to them is a work in progress. But the infrastructure is there.
Hoy describes PlanDesk as a proper enterprise-level, web-based flat planning solution, built to replace legacy platforms that were never designed for the current technology environment. The pitch to publishers is as much about IT overheads as it is about usability.
“You’ve currently got probably two or three people who know about your planning system, with integrations and platform dependencies. We’re saying: get rid of those platforms, free up those skills, host it in the cloud. It’s one environment. You’re not distributing content across multiple platforms. It’s just one place,” says Mike Hoy.
The two products are engineered to work together, sharing identifiers, order references, and content IDs from the sales platform through to editorial. Hoy’s view is that publishers who start with one will quickly want the other.
The ISO certification that came from every RFP
Papermule recently achieved ISO 14001 environmental certification. For a publishing software company, it’s an unusual credential. Hoy’s explanation is straightforward.
“Every RFP I’ve done in the last five years has had an environmental questionnaire. You reach a section that asks, “Are you ISO 14001 accredited?” If no, continue with the questions. If yes, move to page fifty. So you’re essentially doing an ISO accreditation with every single RFP — and it’s horrendous,” says Mike Hoy.
The certification formalises what Papermule was already doing. The business had always operated with environmental considerations in mind. What changed is the procurement friction.
“We want to be easy to do business with. Being able to just say yes, we’ve done it, let’s move on, just helps streamline that new customer experience.”
Publishers are increasingly asking these questions of their suppliers. Kirwan confirms it’s now a standard part of the Guardian’s vendor relationship evaluation. For Papermule, having the certification removes a conversation that, in Hoy’s words, was simply getting in the way.
The risks Kirwan can’t plan for
The technology challenge at the Guardian is largely solved. The workflow is automated, the team is leaner, and the systems are modern. What keeps Kirwan up at night is different.
His team is smaller, which means everyone needs to cover more ground. He is working with Papermule on callout and preflight processes that enable people from a flat-planning background to handle copy management work they couldn’t previously handle.
“We can’t justify specialists in every area now. We need generalists who can cover the entire advertising production process. That’s the challenge the team is stepping up to.”
Then there are the things nobody can plan for. Kirwan points to the 2008 financial crisis, the kind of external shock that overnight restructures the economics of the business. The current geopolitical situation, he suggests, carries the same potential.
“We have to be aware that things like the conflict in the Middle East show you that external factors — economic, political — can hit us in ways we have no control over. Unknown unknowns are a definite worry. You just don’t know where you’re going to be hit.”
On artificial intelligence, Kirwan draws a sharp line. He is open to automating production workflows — copy chasing, image tonal correction, and preflight processes. He will not touch generative AI anywhere near published content.
“This is very much a hesitant area for me. Not generative AI to create anything, and indeed, The Guardian has strict guidelines around the use of AI. Image enhancement in terms of tonal correction, yes. But not creating elements within an image. I want to keep an eye on that and see where the benefits might be.”
The workflow is sorted. The team is smaller and more adaptable. On AI, he’s watching. On everything else, he’s waiting.
