Dead Tree Edition

Dead-Tree Editions Are Dying, But Dead Tree Edition Lives

2020-08-24T03:10:00.000-10:00

The pandemic has been death for dead-tree-edition periodicals, but other types of print are doing just fine. Direct mail, for example, is as relevant as ever, as I explained in an article published last week by Printing Impressions. (Yes, it really is based on a true story.) Marketing mail can do things that other media, whether old or new, simply cannot match. The “hoax” that will disappear as

Publisher Whacks Trump's Pecker

2020-08-22T04:55:00.004-10:00

The marketing company that owns Us Weekly and other magazines announced late yesterday that it had rid the magazine industry of its biggest embarrassment.Accelerate is merging with (that is, taking over) scandal-ridden American Media, Inc. and kicking its controversial CEO, David J. Pecker, to an "Executive Advisor" role. ("David, we've got a big wad of money for you if you can manage to stay out

Deputy Postmaster General Calls It Quits

2020-05-13T07:18:00.001-10:00

Ron Stroman Two days after it announced its selection of a new chief executive, the U.S. Postal Service's #2 official submitted his resignation, the USPS revealed today. "On May 8, 2020, Ronald A. Stroman informed the Chairman of the Board of Governors and the Postmaster General of his intention to resign from the Postal Service effective on June 1, 2020," the agency stated in

Cashing in on USPS Overtime: Why Many Postal Workers Earn More Than Their Bosses

2020-04-19T06:08:00.003-10:00

A U.S. Postal Service employee recently received triple the annual pay of fellow mail handlers by working 4,578 hours during a single year. That’s the equivalent of clocking in for more than 12 ½ hours a day, 365 days a year. Or 11 eight-hours shift per week. The hard-working mail handler was apparently the USPS’s highest-paid front-line employee during Fiscal Year 2018, earning $181,253,

What Will Magazine Publishing Be Like in 2020? January 14

2020-01-22T17:40:00.001-10:00

By a strange coincidence, four separate events on the same day pretty much tell you everything you need to know about magazine media in 2020. Not un-undead yet I could have just waited a few hours and let the events of the day do the talking. Early the morning of January 14, when I submitted my 2020 magazine-publishing forecast to Publishing Executive, I had no idea the day would foretell

Dawn of the Undead: A Recap of U.S. Magazine Publishing in 2019

2019-12-14T07:28:00.000-10:00

If you think 2019 was a good year for magazine publishing, you're ignoring the many iconic publications that died or became "zombies." And if you think 2019 was a bad year for magazine publishing, you're ignoring the many big-money mutant publishers who have joined the magazine world. Along with the zombie that's coming back from the undead. These strange doings are covered in my recent article

Quad's Stock Price Drops 60% in Two Days -- and Now the Lawyers Are Circling

2019-10-31T18:11:00.000-10:00

Cliff diving: Quad stock price on Yahoo! First Meredith, now Quad. The nation's largest magazine printer just entered the same shark-infested water that the country's largest magazine publisher found itself in less than two months ago. In the past two days, at least seven law firms have announced that they are investigating whether to file a class-action lawsuit against Quad (aka Quad/

Quad/Graphics Exiting the Book Business

2019-10-29T18:18:00.000-10:00

UPDATE: Quad's stock price lost more than half its value at the opening bell on October 30 and was still down 53% nearly three hours later. The second largest printer of books in the United States announced late today that it plans to exit the business. Quad, AKA Quad/Graphics, stated in a news release that it "plans to divest book business that generates annual sales of $200 million as

Need a Loan? Subscribe to a Magazine

2019-09-24T17:10:00.000-10:00

Thanks to the big-data revolution, subscribing to a magazine may help you overcome a weak credit score. Many lenders are looking beyond credit scores to determine the credit-worthiness of consumers who have limited or somewhat checkered credit histories, according to a recent article in The Wall Street Journal. About 53 million U.S. adults have no credit scores and another 56 million have

Meredith's Time-Management Problem: The Largest Magazine Publisher Has Some Explaining To Do

2019-09-16T01:17:00.000-10:00

Tom Harty sounds like a guy who thought he’d bought a shiny new car, only to find out the engine had been removed right before he wrote the check. And who then failed to report the theft to his insurance company in a timely manner. Earlier this month, the Meredith CEO made some revealing statements about the mess Meredith inherited when it acquired fellow publisher Time Inc. (My article for

'Weak' Quad and LSC Offered to Shed Assets, But Feds Said No

2019-07-23T00:01:00.000-10:00

"A printing press is a printing press." Update: About two hours after this article was published, Quad and LSC announced they were calling the deal off. More to come. Quad and LSC Communications offered to divest assets to win approval of their proposed merger but were unable to reach a deal with the U.S. Justice Department. Quad (AKA Quad/Graphics) revealed the offer last week in its

Judge Delays Quad-LSC Merger

2019-07-14T14:34:00.000-10:00

Printers' request for expedited trial is rejected. In another sign that Quad’s proposed acquisition of rival printer LSC Communications isn't going as planned, a federal judge has rejected the printers' request for an expedited trial. That could delay the deal’s closing until next year, months after the “mid-2019” date the companies’ leaders projected when they announced the deal on October

How the Feds Used Quad's and LSC's Own Words Against Them

2019-06-25T00:55:00.000-10:00

The U.S. Justice Department's lawsuit seeking to block Quad's purchase of printing rival LSC Communications relies heavily on comments from the two companies themselves. "As LSC CEO Tom Quinlan remarked to investors mere months before the current deal was announced, combining LSC and Quad would eliminate ‘battle[s]’ between the two and could help lead to ‘[p]ricing stability,’” Justice’s

Justice Department Tries to Block Quad-LSC Deal

2019-06-20T11:35:00.000-10:00

The U.S. Department of Justice asked a federal court late this afternoon to block Quad's proposed acquisition of fellow megaprinter LSC Communications. JUNE 21 UPDATE: Quad says it will "vigorously defend" the proposed acquisition despite Justice's objections. It also said it won't predict when the court will issue a ruling. LSC, whose stock price started today down 19%, also expressed

Study Refutes Trump's Claim That USPS Loses Money on Amazon

2019-05-13T18:03:00.000-10:00

An independent government watchdog today seemingly refuted President Trump’s claims that the U.S. Postal Service loses “a fortune” on a sweetheart deal with Amazon. The USPS Office of Inspector General released a study indicating that the Postal Service’s growing practice of entering into customized contracts with package shippers is paying off. “The number of these 'Negotiated Service

Justice Department Seems "Open-Minded" on Quad-LSC Deal

2019-05-07T03:23:00.000-10:00

A printing-industry expert believes the federal officials who questioned him about the proposed merger of printing giants Quad and LSC Communications are unlikely to “rubberstamp” the deal. “They were pretty open-minded,” said the expert, who was recently interviewed by a team from the U.S. Justice’s antitrust division. Although they kept their cards close to the vest, he says, they seemed

Fitting the Pigeonholes: The Challenge of Selling Print Advertising in the Age of Hypertargeting

2019-03-24T09:35:00.000-10:00

The choices are constrained. Pigeonholes. That’s the trouble with print advertising these days. Pigeonholes. Judging from reader feedback, I apparently hit a nerve recently in a Publishing Executive article by stating that many magazine-media advertising reps don’t seem to know how to sell print ads these days. Younger sales reps were hired for their digital knowledge, but their clients

There’s No Such Thing as a Printing Industry

2019-03-04T00:30:00.000-10:00

How can a marketplace with 28,000 companies have shortages of both capacity and competition? Book printing at a Walsworth plant The United States has more than 28,000 printing businesses. So how did printing backlogs cause many highly acclaimed new books to be unavailable for weeks at a time during the recent Christmas shopping season? Were American printing plants really so busy late last

Enjoy a Day of Golf and a Texas Sunset at Falconhead Golf Club

2019-02-21T14:49:00.000-10:00

SPONSORED CONTENT Sunset golf at Falconhead Austin, Texas, is one of the United States’ most-visited cities. The city itself has an eclectic feel and is thriving in a wealth of growth and new businesses. For this reason, people frequently visit Austin for work-related travel or to visit friends and family. While there is a lot to do and see while in Austin, the city has recently become

4 Print-Centric Assumptions Publishers Should Avoid Online

2019-02-20T17:36:00.000-10:00

By D. Eadward Tree, Chief Arborist of Dead Tree Edition My latest article for Publishing Executive looks at some ways digital publishers are often governed by assumptions that are true in the print world but don't make sense on the web. For example, digital publishers are able to see that some content and some readers are many times more valuable to them than others. And yet so many --

5 Things Publishers Should Do Before Erecting a Paywall

2019-02-13T18:33:00.001-10:00

By D. Eadward Tree, Chief Arborist of Dead Tree Edition This is the year, the pundits tell us, when digital publishing will pivot to paywalls. Good luck with that. Getting people to pay for online content is already hard enough. With more publishers in the game, it will become even harder. How many digital subscriptions do you think people will pay for? Tread carefully, or you may become like

USPS Proposal Could Spread Pain to Catalogs

2019-01-24T17:52:00.002-10:00

Comail is working. But in Postal Land, no good deed goes unpunished. Like lashing two water-tight boats to a sinking vessel. The good news — for mailers, printers, and the U.S. Postal Service — is that flat Standard Mail is being sorted far more efficiently than it was just two years ago. The bad news is that the trend is prompting postal officials to consider a proposal that would almost

The FSS Slows, and the Red Ink Flows

2019-01-06T04:19:00.003-10:00

Postal officials still have no fixes for a money-losing billion-dollar boondoggle, except to jack up postage rates for catalogs and magazines. Source: USPS reports. The Leakage metric was introduced in FY2017. For the third year in a row, productivity of the U.S. Postal Service's Flats Sequencing System declined in 2018 – with no end in sight to the money-losing machines’ troubles. Hourly

USPS Workers Are Overpaid and Should Lose Collective-Bargaining Rights, Trump Panel Says

2018-12-06T08:38:00.000-10:00

Claiming that U.S. Postal Service employees are paid much better than workers at FedEx and UPS, a presidential task force wants to de-fang the postal labor unions. "USPS employees enjoy a pay and benefits premium over their private sector counterparts, although the size of this premium is likely falling,” the Trump-appointed Task Force on the United States Postal System said in a report

Hedge Funds Buys Newsstand Giant

2018-11-30T04:50:00.000-10:00

Chatham apparently controls AmericanMedia, publisher of the National Enquirer Yesterday's announcement from the owner of the country's largest magazine wholesaler seems to have flown beneath the radar, but it could have major implications for the U.S. magazine industry. That's why we're publishing the news release word for word, which rarely happens at Dead Tree Edition. We'll leave the