http://www.freepress.net/docs/aprillettertopbg_2.pdf

Most of the threatened magazines are published by single-title publishers or other small companies and not-for-profits that simply don’t have the muscle to play on game boards that benefit the Time-Warners of the world. One of the little-understood problems our country faces is the proliferating number of inherently unfair fights between behemoth corporations and small businesses, small governments, and individuals. This exemplifies the problem.

I remembered hearing you speak at MGP 2006 at UMass-Amherst.

Thanks for your detailed explaination. I had been looking for something like that online. I just always hate to join a movement simply because someone says “Time Warner is evil.” Now that I search “comailing,” I get some deeper understanding; this is from the MPA below:

http://www.magazine.org/government_action/postal/23050.cfm

I have given suggestions as to how to restore a “culture of subscriptions” to online publications via the Online News Association list. But no one responds.

Jon

By focusing on efficiency, Dan misses another crucial variable: scale. The plan the USPS imposed may indeed be modified from what Time-Warner submitted, but it nonetheless radically changes the way periodical postage is figured in a way that actually lowers postage costs for magazines with millions of circulation — the kind that Time-Warner tends to publish — and increases the postage of smaller-circulation magazines by 20 to 25 percent. I’m not exaggerating. I’ve worked the numbers. A magazine publisher’s two biggest costs are paper and postage, so an increase of this size is certain to be enough to kill some small, interesting magazines that aren’t designed to make pubishers rich on tons of ads.

Here’s the rub: Magazines with millions of circulation print so many copies, often in regional plants, that they can truck skid-loads of copies to local postal facilities all over the country, thus qualifying for new low rates the Time-Warner plan establishes.

Magazines with 125,000, or 250,000 or even 500,000 circulation can’t do that. So the commercial printers that specialize in such magazines are using comailing machinery to combine the mailing of many small titles, thus allowing a greater proportion of their copies to be trucked on skids. But the result doesn’t come close to earning the rates the giants get under the new plan.

The magazines hardest hit are weekly opinion magazines; they carry modest advertising, get little help from comailing because it undercuts timeliness — and they have to pay postage 52 times a year. The publishers of The Nation and The National Review worked overcame their political opposition and worked together to assemble a coalition of smaller publishers to write a joint letter of protest to the USPS, to which I eagerly added my signature.

If our nation values varied discourse, and is serious about free speech, this rate structure needs to be rebalanced.

I know, I know, some will read this and think I’m some kind of troglodyte because I’m trying to protect print, that it’s clear that the future of discourse is on the Web. Of course it is. But a huge amount of the material that aggregators aggregate, and that so many of us comment on, originates in print. That will change with time, but should the USPS be the arbiter of the pace of that change?

And, in a nation that’s supposed to be a democracy, should huge corporations have such power to shape political discourse?

Not surprisingly, most of the independent ‘zines don’t give any more detail than saying that the new plan is “complex.” I had to find the bourgeois Business Week to report to get the numbers:

“Postal officials point out that the cost of mailing periodicals has increased faster than for other classes of mail, and federal law requires each class of mail to break even. The new rate structure increases discounts for more efficient mailers who can bundle magazines going to the same Zip Code, ship them directly to a postal distribution center, and make them sortable by machine.”

That’s both sides of the story, for those of you scoring at home.

Then why does it matter what rate the Postal Service charges?