By Editor Morten B. Reitoft 

It's December 24th, and once again, I am sitting in my kitchen getting ready for a cooking marathon. In my part of the world, we celebrate Christmas tonight. The kids are eagerly awaiting the food, the singing, to see family, and of course, the gifts. This year, however, the COVID-pandemic throws its dark shadow over the traditions.

What you can, and can't do, varies from country to country - but hopefully you will have nice Holiday Season with whatever regulations you may have!

For me - today is also a day where I can't help think about how much 2020 has differed from any other of my 52 years. A year ago, I was exactly like now, starting to prepare cooking for my family - but I was filled with good expectations for 2020 - a drupa-year, and for us, also a year where INKISH was going to LIVE 100% on its own. Prospects looked really good, and with a dedicated team, we were for sure on the right course - and then it came. 

Žiga and I were in Munich for the Online Print Symposium, and participants from the UK and Belgium cancelled their participation because of the COVID. Most of us didn't even consider cancelling, I believe? However, just two weeks later, Jan, Žiga, and I were heading to our friends from Schätzl Print Emotion, and everything changed from that moment. Hotels and restaurants, and even city-centers, started to close down, and when I headed back to Copenhagen via Brussels, the airport was so crowded like never before. Everybody was heading home before the total lock-down of Europe. I came home two days before Europe closed its borders. 

Monday morning work was from home. 

Though drupa was not officially postponed, the pre-drupa's and the planned jobs ahead of drupa got cancelled. Hundreds of thousands of euros were in jeopardy, and the future of INKISH was in my mind questioned. How could we possibly do our job when borders were closed? How could we possibly do films from vendors, tradeshows, and printers when travel wasn't an option and show after show got postponed?

I believe the uncertainty is the worst. We soon realized that we had to produce content regardless of travel-bans. We had to continue being hopefully relevant, and we had to use the time to speculate about the future. And so we did.

One of the first outcomes of this was our "Over the Skype" format. Conversations with industry leaders from all over the planet. Together with our INKISH Partners - we have only met Andreas Weber from INKISH DACH in person - agreed to do these interviews for free. 

We have now done 86 'Over The Skype' episodes, and I have watched ALL of them - and they are AMAZING. For the first time, we also soon realized the strength of having partners and creating content in multiple languages. All now online with subtitles, you can easily understand the great stories from Hong Kong, Brazil, Mexico, the US, Germany, France, Belgium, The Netherlands, Canada, Switzerland, Italy, India, and many more places. 

Thank you for watching - and a warm thank you to every participant. These LONG interviews have been watched intensively. At the beginning of the pandemic, people were on furlough or having limited work, so the timing was right—more than 20.000 new viewers on INKISH during the first six months of the pandemic. 

The next thing we did was introducing our Learn With Us format. Learn With Us is, as the name indicates, a learning experience. In a very short time, we investigated what platform to use and then quickly curated a more generic learning program - pricing, web-to-print, technologies, and more. It was fantastic - and the recognition, not only from the audience but also from Hayco van Gaal and his team from Canon EMEA, recognizing INKISH with a price - that almost made me very emotional.

Learn With Us and 'Over the Skype' are two examples of how we quickly adapted to the new "normal," and I believe that many of our friends and partners see INKISH as an agile company able to adapt to situations that require change. With a huge growing audience, we are certain that the content we produce creates value for the people watching.

INKISH.NEWS has also grown rapidly in 2020. NEWS is 100% free to use and now available in English, German, French, Dutch, and Portuguese. One thing is the vendors that have chosen to bring stories on NEWS. But we have also used NEWS to produce content that has 'rocked' the boat. When Heidelberger Druckmaschinen used the pandemic as an excuse to introduce a major strategy-shift, we wrote many articles that have gained a huge number of readers (at least from an INKISH perspective). 

More than 11.000 people read the first three articles about Heidelberg and their strategy, and when we started writing about the Gallus acquisition by benpac holding, this number has grown significantly. 

A series of articles about drupa and the eco-system around drupa, Messe Düsseldorf has also been read by many and led to the next Learn With Us session What's Next just a couple of weeks ago. 

Another INKISH first is remote filming. Together with printers, we produce films filmed by themselves. Setup is on paper simple, but more complicated in reality. Imagine a computer, tablet, or phone where I can talk to the person I want to interview. That is put on a pile of boxes, and when the interview starts, the poor interviewee has to look at me remotely to simulate that we are in the same room! Hereafter we direct the people to what cover-films (b-rolls) we need, samples are sent to us (if required in the film), and then we take the footage, sound, samples and combine them into one film.

The first film we did like this was with our friends from Bennett Graphics, Georgia, USA. They were among the first to buy an HP Indigo 100K - and here is the result!

Now the pandemic is, fortunately, seeing an end. Vaccines are being distributed, and most believe that there is an end to it. This is by all measures good, but we don't think that everything will be like before. Other pandemics can come, and most people now understand how fragile we are. Will be fly again - yes. Will we meet again - yes. Will we have exhibitions - yes. But will flying, meeting, and exhibiting be the same as before - I doubt.

The take-aways from 2020 is that being agile, flexible, transparent, and adaptable is a must. Why shouldn't these measures be good in a post-pandemic time as well? The world is changing, and to run a business, a media, a tradeshow, well, pretty much everything, always requires the ability to align your offerings and services to where your customers are!

A Merry Christmas from me. Thank you for your support in 2020 - and we welcome you in 2021 with many new films, interviews, new ideas, and well new services that we believe will change things a bit in the right direction.