What Angry Birds Can Teach Publishers About Print

The creator of Angry Birds has been a book publisher for less than five months but already grasps a truth that eludes so many long-time publishers.

“It is actually not relevant whether we choose print or a digital channel – what matters is that there is someone out there who cares, who reads, listens, and communicates with us. That’s what publishing is all about, communication,” Peter Vesterbacka, CMO at Rovio Entertainment Ltd, told The Griffin, papermaker UPM-Kymmene’s corporate magazine. Ironically, that quotation is in the print and PDF versions of the magazine but not the web version.

Many panicked publishers seem to have adopted the mindset that the web is replacing print and then apps will replace the web.

No stupid arguments
But Finland-based Rovio and its Angry Birds game apps are so successful that it can actually make intelligent media choices instead of following the herd. You won’t hear any of the stupid print-versus-digital debates that dominate the discussions of more experienced publishers.

“Stories can be told through so many channels, the book is not a given in all cases,” Sanna Lukander of Rovio Books said in November when the company launched its first title, Bad Piggies’ Egg Recipes. “It´s up to us publishers to share the stories in the preferred formats and through the channels that our readers feel comfortable with."

The recipe book, by the way, is not available in Kindle, Nook, or iBook formats. You can only get it in print.

Rovio has followed up with Angry Birds-themed coloring books, board books, and a sticker book – all of which play to print’s strengths. Now it is combing through manuscripts “on the lookout for wonderful stories,” according to The Griffin.

“I must say,” Lukander commented, “that the traditional book is really a wonderful format to cherish.”

Related articles:

• Printed Magazines or Digital Magazines: Do We Have To Choose? 
• Is There Life After Print? Yeah, Maybe at a Community College 
• Are E-Book Sales Reaching a Plateau? 

 

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What Exactly Is Environmentally Preferable Paper?

Please see also the follow-up to this article, Green Groups Turn the Heat Down on National Geographic But Up on KFC.

To understand why selecting environmentally preferable paper is so challenging for publishers and other print buyers, consider these three recent news items:

1. National Geographic Society worked with Hearst Enterprises and Verso Paper to help mostly small land owners achieve Sustainable Forestry Initiative certification for well over 1 million acres of Maine forests. 
2. NGS conducted and published a thorough Life Cycle Assessment of National Geographic magazine’s carbon footprint, which Magazines Canada cited as an example for other publishers to follow.  
3. Green America’s Better Paper Project has targeted NGS with its “Practice What You Print” protests because National Geographic magazine does not use recycled paper.

So amidst all of the Earth Day hype, Dead Tree Edition asks: So which is it, is National Geographic an environmental hero or an environmental villain? More importantly for those of us who buy paper: What exactly is “green” paper?

Does the use of recycled content, as some claim, trump all other factors – such as forestry practices, carbon footprint, and pollution? After all, there’s no shortage of demand for recycled fiber. If you don’t use it, it’s not going to a landfill; someone else will use it.

Perhaps the real benefit of using recycled fiber is to bid up its value, thereby encouraging more recycling. Or maybe it’s to keep that fiber from being shipped to China.

Paper represents the majority of the carbon footprint and probably a majority of the environmental impact for almost every publisher. But there’s a lot more at stake than how many trees were cut down, or weren’t cut down, to make the paper.

Those trees may have come from a sustainably managed forest, where income from timber ensures that the owner doesn’t convert the forest to farmland. Or the trees could have been cut in the process of destroying a forest to convert it to a more profitable use.

Paper making is one of the most energy-intensive of all manufacturing industries. But the carbon footprint varies greatly from mill to mill depending upon whether they rely on coal-fired electricity and oil-fired boilers or are using sources like hydroelectric and biomass.

Paper mills can be nasty polluters, as the people who live near the Pearl River can attest. In fact, part of Green America’s criticism of National Geographic is that its paper comes from a Verso operation in Maine that is “one of the most polluting paper mills in the United States.” (It also notes that the magazine is "perhaps the inspiration for many in the conservation movement.")

But how do you compare one mill’s pollutants to another’s? I’ve never seen credible, apples-to-apples data for U.S. mills. How do you compare the toxicity of one pollutant to another? And are we talking about air pollution, water pollution, or whether the products contain nasty chemicals, like BPA (as most coated papers do)?

And which is more important, a product’s environmental profile or the environmental record of the company that makes it? In other words, is a paper with 100% recycled content really green if it’s made by a company that is raping the rain forest?

I wish I could give you simple answers – “This paper is green. That paper isn’t.” If you really care about your products’ impact on the environment, and aren’t just trying to appear green, the best thing I can tell you is to do your homework. Learn what "environmental-hero" companies are doing. Compare suppliers’ claims. Ask them why their products are greener than the competitions’. Press them to describe what they’re doing to improve and how you can contribute to those efforts.

Iconoclastic Earth Day articles have become a Dead Tree Edition tradition. Here are the offbeat Earth Day features from previous years:

• 5 Brutally Honest Green-Themed Promotions I'd Like To See 
• Condoms to the Rescue, and 5 Other Novel Ideas for Saving the Forests 
• The Greenwashing Media Award Goes to . . .

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Bill Would Address Federal and Postal Retirement Snafus

The longstanding problems of inaccurate pension estimates and slow pension payments for Postal Service and federal employees may finally be addressed by Congress.

Sen. Mark Warner

Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) has proposed an amendment to the postal-reform bill in the Senate that would require monthly reports on the accuracy and timeliness of pension estimates, the backlog of retirement applications, and the status of the retirement systems modernization project.

He would also set Jan. 31, 2013 as the date “by which all Federal payroll processing entities will electronically transmit all personnel data to the Office of Personnel Management.”

Warner’s proposal is one of 39 amendments to S.1789, the 21st Century Postal Service Act, on which the Senate is scheduled to vote Tuesday (April 24). Update: Warner's amendment was included in the version of S.1789 the Senate approved on April 25 and sent to the House.

It’s no coincidence that Warner wants to make his proposal part of a law intended to improve the U.S. Postal Service’s finances. Dead Tree Edition and others have long contended that low-ball pension estimates and the months-long waits for retirees to receive benefits are major hindrances to USPS’s cost-cutting efforts. (See, for example, How Does the Postal Service Discourage Early Retirement? Let Me Count the Ways.)

Downsizing via attrition, mostly from retirements, is a major factor in the Postal Service’s plan to reduce costs in response to declining mail volumes.

Text of amendment
Below is the text of Warner’s proposal, which is known as S.AMDT.2071:

(a) Definition.--In this section, the term ``agency'' has the meaning given that term in section 551 of title 5, United States Code. 

(b) Reports.--Not later than June 1, 2012, and every month thereafter, the Director of the Office of Personnel Management shall submit to Congress, the Comptroller General of the United States, and issue publicly (including on the website of the Office of Personnel Management) a report that-- 

(1) for each agency, evaluates the timeliness, completeness, and accuracy of information submitted by the agency relating to employees of the agency who are retiring; 

(2) indicates-- (A) the total number of applications for retirement benefits that are pending action by the Office of Personnel Management; and (B) the number of months each such application has been pending; and 

(3) provides a timetable for completion of each component of the retirement systems modernization project of the Office of Personnel Management, including all data elements required for accurate completion of adjudication and the date (which shall be not later than January 31, 2013) by which all Federal payroll processing entities will electronically transmit all personnel data to the Office of Personnel Management. 

(c) Budget Request.--The Office of Personnel Management shall include a detailed statement regarding the progress of the Office of Personnel Management in completing the retirement systems modernization project of the Office of Personnel Management in each budget request of the Office of Personnel Management submitted as part of the preparation of the budget of the President submitted to Congress under section 1105(a) of title 31, United States Code.

Related articles:

• How Does the Postal Service Discourage Early Retirement? Let Me Count the Ways
• USPS Seeks 'Soft Landing' For Downsized Employees, Donahoe Says 
• USPS Planning Retirement Incentives To Help Downsizing, Donahoe Testifies

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Is There Life After Print? Yeah, Maybe at a Community College

My fellow printing geeks keep telling me that print isn’t dead, but it sure is looking pretty sick at times.

Here are some of the recent news items that make a “print guy” in the magazine industry feel like a marked man:

Hype-rventilation

Many so-called leaders of the publishing industry have gone ga-ga over the Apple Newsstand, with some recent excitement about the top 100 sellers racking up sales of a whopping $70,000 every day. The top 100 U.S. and Canadian magazine titles on the real newsstand (the ink-on-paper one that's been left for dead) generate $70,000 in sales about once every 19 minutes.

And never mind that most of the Apple Newsstand money is coming from subscriptions, which in the print world are bringing in even more money than single-copy sales.

Seventy Gs a day is chump change for Apple, a rounding error on its bottom line. Print copies of Steve Jobs’ biography are probably selling better. Apple's Newsstand has brought a smidgen of order to the chaos of the App Store, but it's way too early to call it successful.

Cart before the horse

Joining the Apple Newsstand on the recent "2012 Folio 40" list of magazine industry innovators is a Rodale executive chosen because of his work on repositioning the company’s digital magazine editions. Sounds impressive, but this quote kills me:

“We’ll start monetizing soon.” Rodale is a pretty innovative publisher (innovative publisher: Is that an oxymoron?), so the projects’ prospects are pretty good. But shouldn’t a product actually start making money before we hoist the “Mission Accomplished” banner?

What is this, a hobby or a business? I'd say the real hero at Rodale is the person or people who built the "Eat This Not That!" empire. But I suppose that's too print-oriented to be hip.

Dying canary
Newspapers have been the fastest shrinking industry in the U.S. during the past five years, according to a LinkedIn analysis.

No surprise there. Even this old print dinosaur, who not long ago didn’t know his RSS from a hole in the ground, is constantly amazed at how U.S. newspapers don’t “get” the web and aren’t doing enough to remake their bread-and-butter subscription products.

But a lot of people would say the same thing about my industry. Are newspapers our canary in the coal mine?

Is this is good news or bad?

An article in the latest Best Graduate Schools annual bookazine profiles two mid-life career changers who were laid off from their previous jobs – a 25-year veteran of International Paper’s Franklin, VA paper mill and a 22-year circulation employee of the San Francisco Chronicle. Both opted for community college, rather than grad school, to enter more promising careers, one in healthcare radiography and the other as a cook.

“When a career path deadends or the thrill just burns out, a class or two at a community college can inspire, relatively cheaply, a whole new direction,” advises the U.S. News and World Report publication.

It’s no comfort being associated with a line of work that’s become a poster child for dead-end careers. But it’s encouraging to hear that some burned-out, middle-aged ink-on-paper dinosaurs have found ways to avoid career extinction.

Hmm, I wonder how I’d be as a nurse.

Related articles:

• 34 Tricks Print Mags Can Do That Apps Can’t: My recent article for Publishing Executive, when I was in a more optimistic mood about printed magazines.
• Print Is Dead? Not For This Growing Publication Niche: If I lost you with that reference to "bookazine" (AKA "book-a-zine"), this article will explain how this type of printed magazine is defying the decline of the newsstand system.
• App-oplexy: Magazines on the iPad: Explores the difference between "Lick of the Day" and "Sex Position of the Day". 
• 12 Telltale Signs That You Are A Printing Geek: Evidence that I'm not always grumpy about being a print geek.
• Not Dead Yet: If you want an antidote to my print-is-dead pessimism, check out this little video that Noelle Skodzinski used to open the recent Publishing Business Conference with a laugh. Alas, Noelle, who showed us all how to extend a magazine brand into multiple media without neglecting the actual magazine, has since left her post as editor of Publishing Executive and Book Business.

 

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Weak Demand Will Mean Higher Paper Prices

Decreasing demand for publication papers in the U.S. is apparently having a counterintuitive result: higher prices. Or, at the least, higher minimum price levels during down markets.

There’s a logical explanation, and it doesn’t involve repealing the law of supply and demand. Nor does it mean that paper companies will be especially profitable in the future.

 “Newsprint will never fall below $500/tonne again, and will probably spend little time below $600/tone,” Verle Sutton wrote in the April issue of The Reel Time Report. “Average coated groundwood prices [for 40# #5] may drop below $800/ton in 2012, but will not get close to the 2009 low point of $730/ton. In fact, the current cyclical decline might be the last one in which coated groundwood pricing falls below $800/ton.”

Sutton is no optimist about the paper industry. He questions whether recently announced price increases for coated paper will stick and is especially bearish about the industry’s long-term prospects, as discussed in Why Coated Paper Prices Look Ready for a Fall.

The phenomenon Sutton describes – higher pricing “floors” for publication papers in future down markets -- is actually the result of the gloomy outlook for publication papers. It's somewhat akin to predictions that printed magazines will continue to exist for the foreseeable future, but as luxury items with much higher price points than today.

Riding the roller coaster
For decades, the prices of coated paper, newsprint and other publication grades rode a roller coaster through loose and tight markets.

Over the long haul, the roller coaster’s trend remained pretty flat: The price at one peak was generally close to the previous peak. The same was true of the troughs. It’s not a particularly unusual phenomenon: The prices of manufactured goods rarely keep up with overall inflation in the long run.

In the old days – until about, oh, 10 years ago – rising demand encouraged investments in new paper machines and in machine rebuilds. Input costs – labor, energy, fiber, chemicals – kept increasing, but the investments resulted in fewer inputs to make each ton of paper.

The result was that mills couldn’t just pass along their cost increases to customers; there was always a competitor with a shiny new machine and efficient cost structure that was happy to take on customers at a slightly lower price.

No more new machines
But no one will build another publication-paper machine in North America for the foreseeable future – if ever. With so many paper companies in or on the verge of bankruptcy, significant capital investments in existing machines are rare. The most efficient machines today are likely to remain the most efficient for years to come.

That means the industry’s efficiency gains are too meager to counter the impact of rising input costs. A coated-groundwood machine that was barely cash positive at the last market bottom in 2009 would now be shut down long before prices could drop to $730/ton again.

What’s not as clear is whether market peaks will also be higher than in the past. Price spikes occur when demand outstrips supply, which in a declining market can only happen when supply decreases. But demand has been decreasing so rapidly in recent years that, even when a machine is shut down, market tightness lasts for only a few months at most.

Another wild card is imports. New paper machines are being built in some developing countries, especially China. But tariffs, a shortage of fiber, and clumsy management have limited the Chinese mills’ impact on U.S. prices.

Perhaps if the oil market crashes, Canadian currency would weaken enough to make idle mills north of the border competitive again. The Canadian paper industry has been so devastated, however, that it’s hard to envision it rising from the ashes to cause major market disruptions in the U.S.

What seems most likely is that North American paper makers will continue to scuffle along, closing the highest-cost machines and mills when declining demand and prices force their hand. But those "cry 'uncle'" spots -- the price levels that force shutdowns and market firming -- may never be as low as they were in the past.

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Folio: Magazine Honors Donahoe As Innovator

Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe was named today to Folio: magazine's "2012 Folio: 40" list of the magazine industry's "most innovative and distinguished professionals."

The Donahoe article, published online today and to appear in an upcoming issue of the magazine, cited Donahoe's "continued commitment to magazine media, while also remaining steadfast on the realities surrounding the challenges the USPS is combating."

Donahoe has reassured publishers that the U.S. Postal Service won't try to solve its financial problems by jacking up their postage rates, the article said. He's trying instead to cut costs, it added, by reducing the number of employees and postal facilities and by eliminating Saturday delivery.

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FSS Machines Running Far Slower Than Planned

Flats Sequencing System machines continue to run much slower than their target speeds and aren't getting any faster. But they also aren't breaking down as often as they were last year, according to a Postal Service presentation.

From October through mid-February, the average number of pieces sequenced hourly ranged from 7,000 to 10,000 per week, well below the target of nearly 12,000. Throughputs so far this year have stabilized in the range of 8,000 to 9,000 per hour with a slightly downward trend, according to a presentation Megan J. Brennan, USPS's Chief Operation Officer, made at a recent Mailers Technical Advisory Committee (MTAC) meeting.

But the "Mean Time Between Failure", a measure of how frequently the machines break down that was at about 10 for most of August and September, has been consistently above 13 recently. And the time it took to get a machine back online dropped by about one-third in a six-month period.

Postal officials reported that rapid deployment of the huge machines -- 89 during Fiscal Year 2011 -- led to service challenges and a "learning curve for technicians." USPS has updated FSS-related training, instituted more diagnostic maintenance, and revised various procedures to improve efficiency and reduce extensive delays in the delivery of flat mail, such as catalogs and magazines.

It's also working on ways to reduce the frequent damage to mail pieces that has earned FSS the nickname "Flats Shredding System".

Increasing the machines' reliability may be more important than increasing their speeds. FSS' erratic performance wreaked havoc during the busy fall mailing season, especially for letter carriers whose routes were "adjusted" (expanded) under the assumption that FSS would enable them to spend more time delivering the mail.

Many reported that they still had to sequence more than half of the flat mail they deliver, sometimes on their laps during "street time." Among the comments:

• "Since the start of the fall junk mailing season, we've had many days where were get raw flats we have to manually case because the one machine they have at the plant can't keep up with the volume. Needless to say, along with the fact management overestimated FSS's savings by making our routes mega-routes, O.T. is pretty much a daily occurence."
• "Flats come in late and destroyed. Some days we have zero FSS, other days we have 10 trays. Three days last week it showed up late and the carriers had to come back to the office to retrieve it. This week the FSS came in postcons because management didn't anticipate the amount of flats we are receiving and didn't purchase enough FSS carts. 
• "The day before Thanksgiving I had 3 trays of FSS. The day after Thanksgiving I had 21 trays plus 5 tubs I was supposed to throw in the morning. I've seen a lot of disasters in my 26 years here but this system is a complete failure. 

Dead Tree Edition has published more than 20 articles about FSS, which is supposed to revolutionize the handling and delivery of flat mail, including FSS Is Increasing USPS's Costs, Expert Says, 7 Reasons the Jury Is Still Out on Flats Sequencing, and the ever-popular Unofficial Guide to Flats Sequencing.

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Here's Why We Avoid Four-Color Body Type

Thank you, The Wall Street Journal. You did me and a whole lot of other production managers a huge favor today with your printing foul-up.

Every couple of years, it seems, I have to talk an editor out of going along with a designer's proposal to jazz up a publication by getting rid of boring old black body type in articles. "Ooh, purple would look nice."

It was hard enough way back in the 20th Century to explain why printing 8-point type with four colors of ink would create an illegible mess. At least then most editors and designers had some clue about how printing worked.

Nowadays, you're likely to be dealing with someone who cut his teeth on the web and can't fathom why what he sees on his monitor can't look exactly the same when printed. ("I don't want four colors; I only want purple!" "Well, if the printer can't make the colors register exactly, get another printer.")

Now I have my evidence.

The Journal printed a graphic showing Pinterest postings intended to inspire innovation among General Electric employees. (Pinterest, by the way, is also known as OSASMCWOTT, which stands for "Oh, S#&t, Another Social-Media Craze We Ought To Try".)

The Pinterest captions use colored body type, which is fine for the web but looked like mud when printed in the copy of the Journal I have. I literally could not read some of the captions.

It's sorcery
When I watch a six-foot-wide roll of paper zipping through an offset web press at 30 miles an hour having tiny dots placed on it one color at a time, I'm always amazed that the process can result in accurate reproductions of color photos. Getting those dots to line up precisely on a sheet of paper that changes dimension as it goes through the press is nothing short of alchemy, or maybe sorcery.

As Gordon Pritchard notes, one set of dots only has to be 1/300th of an inch out of place for the colors to be considered out of register.

The great thing about the Journal example is that the photos don't look bad for newspaper printing. But slight misregistration that is tolerable for photos becomes a disaster when applied to small type.

Related articles:

• Money-Saving Trend: Using GCR to Reduce Ink Consumption 
• 12 Telltale Signs That You Are A Printing Geek 
• Follow The Grayscale-Brick Road: Why Color E-Ink Doesn’t Rival Four-Color Printing 
• The Changing World of Print Buyers: An Interview with Margie Dana

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