The Chronicle, only different

Richard Pérez-Peña has an article in The New York Times about The San Francisco Chronicle, and changes thereto:

The San Francisco Chronicle stopped printing last week, which means, oddly enough, a better printed Chronicle. Which, the paper hopes, is one answer to competition from the Internet. This is not one of those stories about old media going all-digital— The Chronicle, owned by the Hearst Corporation, still comes out daily on paper. But it has become the biggest newspaper in the country to outsource all of its printing, to Transcontinental Printing, a Canadian company that produces The Chronicle at a new plant in Fremont, California.
Last Monday, the paper included a four-page special section boasting of the highly automated plant, which prints crisper images and more vivid color than The Chronicle’s own presses. A message in the special section from Frank J. Vega, the publisher, said the new plant “does for newspapers what high-definition has done for television.” An article in the section says editors want to produce “a paper that can compete effectively against the imagery of the Internet.”
No one disputes that The Chronicle’s old presses, built in the 1950s and later upgraded, were problematic, producing pallid and often hazy images. But critics question how essential new presses are when readers are abandoning print for the Internet, and the paper is losing tens of millions of dollars a year. “It’s like they zoomed ahead to the 1990s,” said Ken Doctor, a newspaper analyst with Outsell, a research company. “There is some attraction for better color, for readers and advertisers, but it won’t fundamentally change the direction. The Internet is about immediacy and diversity of sources, not about seeing things in better color,” he said.
Michael Keith, The Chronicle’s marketing director, said the paper believed better printing would help keep the print readers it has, not necessarily win back former ones. “We would like that,” he said. “I’m not sure it’s really an expectation.” Shifting to the new plant allowed The Chronicle to eliminate more than 200 jobs, but Mr. Keith would not say whether it had lowered operating costs. Hearst signed a deal with Transcontinental for 15 years— past the time some analysts predict printed papers will endure. The company declines to say whether it has an escape clause.