Independent U.S. mags hit hard by postal changes

The Nation magazine, a venerable U.S. leftwing weekly, has raised the alarm with its readers about a postage increase of more than 18% that took effect this week. That represents a postal bill of US$500,000 for the magazine, which has a circulation of 18,600 186,500 (a few hundred of which are in Canada). The magazine has launched a fundraising drive to pay the added costs. So far, its readers have anted up about $270,000.

The Nation says that it is not alone; that a new deal struck between the US Postal Service (USPS) and the industry means that independent weeklies in particular are getting hammered, according to a story in Folio: online. (Indeed, a coalition of left- and right-wing independents including The American Conservative, The American Spectator, Ms., Mother Jones, The New Republic, Foreign Affairs and many others, has signed a joint letter protesting the rates. And The Nation and The National Review co-wrote an op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times denouncing the rate increase.)

According to The Nation president Teresa Stack, her magazine’s more dramatic rate increase is indicative of what smaller, independent magazines are experiencing.

The magazine’s weekly frequency has made it difficult for Stack to exploit distribution efficiencies such as co-mailing and co-palleting. “Our first experience was it was a disaster and no weeklies at our printer are co-mailing, the delivery compromises are too extreme,” she says. “If you’re a monthly or bi-monthly obviously you have more options. The weeklies are getting killed.”

The new scheme, which was pushed through last fall, largely by lobbyists for big publishers like Time Warner, essentially rewards efficiency in mailing, which is essentially of benefit only to the largest mailers. Time Warner and other big mailers argued that they had been subsidizing smaller, inefficient mailers. Folio: quoted Jim O’Brien, VP, distribution & postal affairs at Time, Inc., as saying in a BusinessWeek story that publishers that are mailing efficiently are subsidizing the publishers that aren’t “to the tune of 60 cents on the dollar.”

When the USPS deal was announced, it was said that smaller mailers who weren't going to be able to take advantage of these efficiencies might face an 11% increase. The reality has turned out to be much worse.

David Straus, postal counsel for American Business Media, argued against the Time Warner proposal earlier in the year noting that it would hurt small-to-mid sized publishers who couldn’t take advantage of distribution efficiencies that the larger titles could. “The new rate approach indeed hits very hard those medium-sized and small circulation publications that cannot go into a co-mail program,” says Straus.