Postal

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,…

“Told you so. Now don’t try to slap us with a Stupidity Tax.” That, in essence, is the magazine industry’s response to the U.S. Postal Service’s latest attempt to jack up postal rates for publishers. For the past decade, changes in publishers’ average postal rates have been limited to the rate of inflation. But a…

(Washington, DC)-- On Monday, March 20, three mailer organizations representing all segments of the mailing community and all classes of mail urged the Postal Regulatory Commission to retain the inflation-capped pricing structure that has protected captive users of the Postal Service’s monopoly services for the past decade. That system provides the Postal Service with sufficient…

More than seven years after it began rolling out, the billion-dollar system that was supposed to revolutionize how publications and other flat mail are handled is still making the U.S. Postal Service less, not more, efficient. In fact, the Flats Sequencing System’s performance, already well below plan, declined even further last year, according to a…