Dominic Bichler, who was hired in May, runs several stackers, machines that collect printed pages in groups that will later be bound into magazines. Credit: Michael Sears

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Sussex — Quad/Graphics Inc. has shut down 21 printing plants since 2010, when the biggest printer of magazines and catalogs in North America launched a wholesale restructuring.

Casualties of a digital age, the closures are commonplace in a shrinking ink-on-paper industry that has shed a quarter of a million jobs nationally in little more than a decade.

In Quad's home state of Wisconsin, however, it's a whole different story.

"We are actively recruiting," said Rachel Leatherbury, a senior Quad executive.

The Sussex-based company is in the process of filling 750 openings in Wisconsin, where Quad has kept all nine of its printing plants up and running. That includes its "mega-plant" in Lomira that Quad calls the largest printing plant in the Western Hemisphere.

Help-wanted ads numbering in the hundreds stand out in a slow-growth state like Wisconsin, which is a chronic laggard in job creation compared with the U.S. average.

So it's all the more astonishing that Quad is seeking new hires after it already has increased its Wisconsin head count by more than 600 since 2010. That's the year it began acquiring a succession of rival printers, all the while closing the oldest and least efficient of the newly absorbed plants and moving work to Wisconsin, where Quad says it runs its most automated and efficient presses. Yet another 400 workers came on board in those four years through acquisitions within Wisconsin with printing jobs that Quad has retained.

There's no doubt that Quad operates in a tough trade with paper-thin margins. But those who argue that printing presses are going the way of rotary dial telephones might be surprised at Quad's home-state hiring binge.

Quad almost single-handedly has helped prop up one of the state's signature industries. Printers that work on contract for publishers and advertisers rank among the biggest industries in the Badger State, a legacy of the state's sprawling 150-year-old papermaking industry. According to a comprehensive study last year by the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp., the state's combined papermaking and printing industries rank hands down as Wisconsin's single-biggest economic driver.

In the three years from 2010 to 2013, employment in Wisconsin's printing sector rose 2% while it shrank 6% nationally, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. In the same period, however, wages in the Wisconsin printing sector stagnated and didn't keep pace with inflation. Quad didn't disclose its pay scales, but the bureau's data shows wages in the state printing sector average about $900 a week.

With nearly 7,000 current employees in its home state — none of Quad's Wisconsin plants are unionized — it ranks as one of Wisconsin's largest manufacturing employers. That's a full third of Quad's total North American staffing of 20,000 spread over 56 facilities.

Analog publications that roll off Quad's presses and into mailboxes and newsstands include Time, Sports Illustrated, Rolling Stone, Esquire and catalogs like L.L. Bean, as well as books, retail inserts and direct mail by the ton. When all forms of commercial printing are taken into account, including phone directories and advertising, Quad is second only to Chicago-based R.R. Donnelley & Sons Co., the biggest printer in North America.

Growth by acquisition

The company's founding Quadracci family is widely known around metropolitan Milwaukee for its philanthropy, endowing museums, theaters and foundations. Its global headquarters at its flagship plant in Sussex is only about 25 miles west of Milwaukee. But its executives deny any home-state favoritism when it comes to the cold calculus of locking factory gates and cutting jobs.

"We consolidate work into facilities where we believe we can achieve the greatest manufacturing and distribution efficiencies," spokeswoman Claire Ho said in an email. "Quad/Graphics' Wisconsin network of plants have benefited from continual reinvestment over the years, making the platform here very efficient."

Jamie Clement, an analyst in New York who follows the printing industry for Sidoti & Co. LLC, said Quad was not alone in making acquisitions to gain new titles and market share. Donnelley, which this year paid $620 million for Houston-based Consolidated Graphics Inc., also acquires rivals to boost orders while closing printing plants.

In Quad's case, however, "it just so happens that the state of Wisconsin is home of some of their most advanced and efficient printing plants," Clement said.

The company argues that its Wisconsin-based facilities have some of the newest and most efficient presses available, making it logical to move work from those that are older, underutilized and inefficient.

Robots are installed around the cavernous Sussex facility, which specializes in high-end monthly magazines like Vogue, Golf Digest and Runner's World. The robotic arms lift and stack hundreds of pounds of freshly printed magazines at a time as they roll off the presses, each doing the work that once took several people.

Overseeing a battery of robots — each a multimillion-dollar investment — is Dominic Bichler, 30, who was hired in May and shepherded through Quad's in-house training programs.

"Training is pretty much nonstop," said Bichler, who previously worked as a security guard. "You are constantly training."

Hiring from outside

Many of the newest press operator jobs came to Wisconsin after Quad's latest pair of closures, both on the opposite side of the Wisconsin state line.

Earlier this summer, the Wisconsin printer said it would close its printing plant in Woodstock, Ill., costing 550 jobs. Quad acquired the Woodstock facility in April with its acquisition of Brown Printing Co., the nation's third-largest magazine printer and fifth-largest catalog-printer.

At the same time, Quad announced it would close its printing facility in St. Cloud, Minn., a 280-worker facility that landed with Quad with its 2010 acquisition of its huge but struggling Canadian rival, World Color Press Inc.

Those displaced in Woodstock and St. Cloud can apply to transfer, but Leatherbury, a manager in Quad's global staffing division, expects the majority of the hires to come from outside the company. The majority of new positions are in production jobs and carry full-time status. A minority of the new positions are seasonal, meant to accommodate a rush of work involving fall fashion catalogs and holiday advertising.

All nine of Quad's Wisconsin facilities have openings, including its largest in Lomira and Sussex — each with more than a million square feet. Quad's ink-manufacturing facility in Hartford is looking for new hands, said Jeff Kohlhapp, a Quad "talent acquisition specialist."

Also seeking new hires is the QuadMed subsidiary. It was created as an in-house health care system meant to control Quad's medical costs and has evolved since then into a separate health care service to more than 100 non-Quad employers.

As content migrates online and printing companies around the world consolidate, Quad has signaled that it wants to be among those that remain in business by acquiring scope and scale rather than shrink and disappear or become relegated to a tiny specialized niche.

Starting with World Color in 2010, Quad has been remaking itself through a succession of eight printing acquisitions. The expansion has more than doubled its size: Annual sales reached $4.8 billion last year, from less than $2 billion in 2009. Today, Quad boasts 70 printing plants in eight countries spanning the Americas, Europe and India.

Some in Wisconsin are astonished that a printer would hire so aggressively.

"We get that message all the time," said Nicole Mosca, a corporate communications manager at Quad.

Under Chief Executive Joel Quadracci, Quad is betting that print will retain a role in a "multichannel" world. Quadracci has become an evangelist for the future of print, saying he wants to integrate traditional printing with other digital platforms. His company's slogan: "Innovative people redefining print."

"It's not necessarily a straight line downward by any means," said Clement, the Sidoti analyst, commenting on the ink-on-paper trend. "There will be ups and downs over a longtime horizon."