The Biggest Stories of 2012, the Year of No

It's been a year of "no" in this little corner of the universe -- no postal reform, no big paper merger, no more listing on the RISI Top 50, no major bankruptcies. There was even a double negative: no No Print Day.

The hot topic this year for Dead Tree Edition readers has been retirement: Nine of the 10 most-read stories dealt with efforts (or lack thereof) to downsize the U.S. Postal Service workforce by getting more employees to quit.

Here's a brief recap of the year's highs and lows:

• Most popular article: By a landslide it was USPS Planning Retirement Incentives To Help Downsizing, Donahoe Testifies, with 42,000+ page views, more than double that of any other story.
• Most commented article: 8 Reasons USPS Productivity Is Declining: The Employees Speak Out, with a whopping 74, including many insightful responses from the Postal Service's front lines.
• Most influential article: Some would say it was Greenpeace Sticks It To Toshiba: Company Has No Paper Policy because an embarrassed Toshiba pulled the plug on its hypocritical No-Print Day the next day, but I suspect that was a coincidence. My vote is for 10 Questions About Toshiba's No-Print Day, which nine days earlier brought Toshiba's greenwash effort to the attention of a fairly small audience, but an audience that quickly spread the word to more influential writers and industry leaders. Dead Tree Edition only lit the spark for what became the Yes Print Day! movement. The flames were fanned into a raging fire by the likes of Printing Industries of America and Deborah Corn -- The Social Media Goddess of the printing industry, Intergalactic Ambassador to the Printerverse, The Princess of #Printchat, and an advocate for Girls Who Print (whose unofficial slogan is "We can manage our PMS -- and our CMYK too!").
• Not so influential: In 2010 and 2011, RISI named D. Eadward Tree to its Top 50 list of the most influential people in the global pulp and paper industry because of Dead Tree Edition's work on the black liquor tax boondoggles for U.S. pulp producers. But that changed this year, as explained in Mr. Tree Gets the Axe, one of the least popular articles of the year with only 525 page views.
• Most popular non-postal (mostly) article: Which of These 4 Print-Related Giants Is Headed for Bankruptcy? Cast Your Vote, which explored whether USPS, Barnes & Noble, Quad/Graphics, or Verso Paper would go into the tank during 2012. Despite what the poll predicted, all have made it through the year without a visit to Chapter 11 Land.
• Most studied article: Lessons About the New World of Publishing from an Unlikely Source, on which the average reader spent more than six minutes.
• Most Shakespearean headline: Did Verso Come To Purchase NewPage Or To Bury It? As it turns out, Verso did neither. North America's two largest makers of coated paper will apparently not merge, and NewPage is on the verge of exiting bankruptcy protection.

I'm following the common practice of my industry, magazine publishing, by publishing a year's best/biggest/sexiest/etc. list before the year is even over. There's some danger in that, but I think the main events for the rest of the year are pretty predictable:

• Dec. 21: We will survive the winter solstice.
• Dec. 22: A publicist hired by the Mayans will announce that their calculations were only slightly off: 2012 is not the end of Time but the end of Newsweek. (Technically speaking, they will be wrong; Newsweek is not going away, it's just discontinuing its print edition. Technically speaking, Newsweek died about three years ago.)
• Dec. 25: Millions of Americans will ooh and ah over sheets of coated freesheet paper printed with bright colors (aka Christmas wrapping paper), then promptly shred it with their bare hands. Some of it will get recycled.
• Dec. 31: Despite widespread agreement that 2012 was the year the Postal Service's financial situation needed to be addressed, Congress will go home having done nothing about USPS -- except for taking the heroic step of naming more post offices.

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Postal Service Plans To Sell Magazine Subscriptions

The U.S. Postal Service, at the urging of publishers, is planning to sell magazine subscriptions on its web site and to promote them at post offices.

“The USPS is moving forward on a plan to offer magazine subscriptions for sale on usps.com,” says Idealliance’s summary of the recent Mailers’ Technical Advisory Committee (MTAC), a joint USPS-mailers groups. “Also, the USPS and mailers are developing a plan to have posters in retail sites with QR codes and other ways of linking to magazine subscriptions.”

When the idea originally surfaced at an MTAC meeting early this year, it included selling subscriptions in post office lobbies, as stores including Best Buy do at checkout. But setting up such a program for hundreds or even thousands of publications might not be worth the effort. It will be easier to test the QR-code posters in select locations.

Postal officials’ interest in promoting magazines may seem odd in light of the Postal Service’s claim that the Periodicals class is its most unprofitable type of mail. But that supposed unprofitability is the result of allocations for fixed costs, some questionable cost accounting, and perhaps handling costs that are unique to newspapers and not magazines.

There doesn’t seem to be much question that delivering more magazines would be beneficial for USPS. And magazine subscriptions also lead to additional mail that is more profitable, such as invoices and renewal notices.

Thorny issues
But having the Postal Service sell magazine subscriptions also raises some thorny issues:

• Will there be complaints that USPS is using its monopoly power to compete unfairly with businesses like subscription agents and Amazon? 
• Will the subscription offers only be for the ink-on-paper versions of the magazines, or will combined print-and-digital packages be allowed? How about electronic-only subscriptions? 
• Will publishers have to pay a fee to have their magazines featured on the QR posters? Will the Postal Service get a cut of the subscription revenues? 
• If a magazine distributes some of its subscriber copies via means other than the mail, will it still be eligible for the program? 
• What about newspapers that are delivered primarily by mail? They will complain vociferously if they are excluded. 
• Should people who buy subscriptions via USPS still “expect six to eight weeks for delivery”? 

 Related articles: 

• Don’t Blame ‘Overpaid Postal Workers' for Rising Periodicals Costs  
• Do Postal Execs Want To Lose Money on Periodicals? 
• Thrown Overboard: Publishers Feel Abandoned by the U.S. Postal Service  
• Postal Study Is Bad News For Publishers

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Employee Buyouts Surpass USPS Projection

At least 23,000 APWU-represented employees have signed up for incentives to leave the U.S. Postal Service, according to Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe.

Donahoe provided that number at a "State of the Postal Service" presentation last week to leaders of the Mailers' Technical Advisory Committee (MTAC), according to notes released yesterday by Idealliance, a trade organization of publishers and their suppliers. Postal officials had predicted that 15,000 to 20,000 of the approximately 115,000 eligible employees would take the buyout, which includes $15,000 and for many the chance to take early retirement.

Full-time employees had until yesterday to accept the buyout or to change their minds if they had already signed up. Part-timers' deadline is Jan. 4.

Donahoe also told the MTAC leaders that USPS is urging the lame-duck session of Congress to take action on postal reform and not start over in 2013, according to the Idealliance summary. The key issues are removing the burden of prefunding retiree health benefits and allowing five-day delivery, he said.

Related articles:

• USPS Underestimates How Many Employees Will Take the Money and Run, Poll Says
• Congress Is Fixin' To Fix the Postal Service  
• USPS Planning Retirement Incentives To Help Downsizing, Donahoe Testifies

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Weeklies' Weakness Pushes Down 3rd Quarter Newsstand Sales

Although the latest statistics on North American newsstand sales look gloomy overall, they also show significant growth for many magazines.

Third-quarter newsstand sales in the U.S. and Canada totaled 874.2 million, down nearly 8% from a year ago, according to MagNet.

“Newsweeklies and especially celebrity titles continue to lead the decline,” the industry consortium reported. But for non-weeklies, MagNet sees signs of “high newsstand consumer demand [for] quality publications that are not providing huge subscription discounts.”

Among major monthly titles experiencing healthy growth were National Geographic (23.8%), Shape (9.5%), and Consumer Reports (7.0%). (Is it just a coincidence that National Geographic and Consumer Reports have also invested heavily in their web sites? Maybe digital and print are not enemies after all.)

Sales for the Top 50 publications, which include most of the celebrity weeklies, were down 8.3%. But the next 50 actually increased their sales 7.4%. Nearly one-third of the Top 100 enjoyed increases, according to MagNet.

Another favorable trend: Less waste. Publishers responded to weakening newsstand sales by distributing 64 million fewer copies than they did a year ago, including a 15.7% reduction for weeklies. But because unit sales did not decline as much as the reduction in draw, the proportion of newsstand copies that were sold increased by nearly 2 percentage points for the weeklies and nearly 1 percentage point for the non-weeklies.

Related articles: 

• Trouble in Magazine Land: We're Running Out of Celebrities!  
• Print Is Dead? Not For This Growing Publication Niche  
• Invasion of the Bookazines, Featuring the Return of the Living Dead  
• 8 Questions About Newsweek's Future

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