Postal

Depending upon which experts you heed, the U.S. Postal Service is either just a few months away from insolvency or it’s in no danger of running out of cash any time soon. The purpose of accounting, one of my favorite professors used to say, is to give people the information they need to make decisions.…

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that 2020 will see more magazine closures and more experiments with reader paywalls. Here are eight, or maybe nine, not quite so obvious publishing predictions that will help you prepare for the year ahead: Paper Shortage A glut of magazine-quality paper has recently pushed prices down a…

The U.S Postal Service net loss for its fiscal year was $8.8 billion, an increase in net loss of $4.9 billion compared to 2018.

Though the merger of megaprinters Quad and LSC Communications has been called off, publishers may still find it harder to strike a favorable printing deal in the coming months. Calling magazine and catalog printing “a broken part” of LSC, Tom Quinlan, the CEO, indicated earlier this month that LSC would be scaling back that part of…

New Orleans, LA, July 8th 2018­­­ – Blanchard Systems has received PAGE Certification from the United States Postal Service for Virtual Publisher.  Virtual Publisher is Blanchard’s cloud based SAAS solution to Plan, Produce, Approve and Deliver Ad and Editorial page content.  This certification eliminates the need to send marked copies of magazines to United States…

"The Postal Reform Act of 2018: Improving Postal Operations, Service, and Transparency" was introduced in the U.S. Senate yesterday as a bipartisan bill co-sponsored by senators Tom Carper (D-Del.), Jerry Moran (R-Kan.), Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.) and Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.). If passed, the legislation would make sweeping changes to current rules and regulations that have led, in…

A plan to jack up postal rates over the next five years would force the nation’s largest magazine publisher to slash its print offerings, according to the company’s CEO. Meredith Corporation would “pursue magazine closures, circulation cuts, issue frequency reductions, conversions to digital only formats and alternative delivery for some magazine subscription copies,” Tom Harty,…

A big party I recently attended illustrates a principle behind what I’ve consistently found to be the greatest source of waste, the greatest source of potential cost savings, and the biggest differentiator between competing printing proposals for all but the smallest-circulation magazines. And because of likely regulatory changes, new opportunities for postal savings (or waste)…

The Postal Regulatory Commission is proposing that publishers’ postal rates increase by an estimated average of 34% to 41% over the next five years. The postage increases would be lower than average for magazines that use co-mail and higher than average for less efficient mailers. The PRC announced its proposal to bail out the U.S.…

Declining demand is supposed to cause lower prices, but the magazine industry’s key suppliers are likely to defy the law of supply of demand in 2018, with both paper companies and the U.S. Postal Service raising prices by a little – and perhaps by a lot. Yes, folks, it’s that most wonderful time of year,…