Size matters -- too much -- in U.S. postal rates, say smaller magazines

The impending restructuring of postal rates in the U.S. is predicted to have major, damaging effects on mid-size and smaller titles. A deal cooked up between Time Warner and some of the other big players with the United States Postal Service (USPS) , giving large-circulation titles a break for volume and doing most of the post office's sorting for them.

Titles that, while big by Canadian standards, are small in the U.S. context cannot qualify for the proposed price breaks and find the costs of the big magazines' breaks transferred to them.

Members of a coalition of smaller and independent publishers, led by the left-liberal The Nation and the conservative-right National Review appeared last week before the Federal Workforce, Postal Service and District of Columbia subcommittee of the US House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform (ed. note: phew).

What was said there is intrinsically interesting but also applicable to discussions in Canada about the beleaguered Publications Assistance Program (PAP).

In reporting on the submissions, The Nation said the federal postal policy changes "favour size over content, bigness over quality".

• Scott McConnell of The American Conservative magazine explained said "the postage increases we are facing under the new provisions are little less than catastrophic."
  
• Christopher L. Walton, editor of UU World, published by the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations explained, "It is disturbing to learn that the new rates abandon the long-standing American tradition of supporting a diverse marketplace of ideas with a fair and uniform postage rate for periodicals. Historically, the periodicals rate allowed small journals of opinion to reach a national audience. But the new rates reward high-circulation periodicals with discounts that smaller-circulation periodicals simply cannot qualify for."
• In These Times editor Joel Bleifuss said: "These reckless postal rate increases are aimed at the heart of our nation's independent press. I urge you to ask the spokespeople of the media conglomerates whether they would support these increases if their mailing costs had risen 23 percent. This is a democracy issue."

But of most interest was a presentation by Nation Publisher Emeritus Victor Navasky, who now directs the Delacorte Center for Magazines and Delacorte Professor of Magazine Journalism at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism and is director of the Columbia Journalism Review. Here is what he said:

"I have never understood why of all the services government provides--defense, education, environmental protection, health, housing, highways and the rest--only the mails are required to break even or make a profit. The founders, who saw the mails as the circulatory system of our democracy, made no such presumption. George Washington himself was in favor of the free delivery of newspapers (which, by the way, in those days were often weekly and usually partisan, and as such the equivalent of today's journals of political opinion). These journals, whose core franchise is public discourse about public affairs, are, like water, national defense, public highways and public education, a public good and as such it would seem to me ought to be paid for out of public funds (i.e. general tax revenues)."

Navasky made several suggestions for addressing the problems of the wrong-headed rate proposal.

• Allow the first 250,000 copies of all publications to be mailed at reduced rates
  
• Put a moratorium on postal increases for magazines with a low percentage of advertising content, low circulation or non-profit status
• Ask the USPS to extend non-profit rates to small-circulation political magazines.

"It is no accident that the president of The Nation and the publisher of National Review, two periodicals on the opposite sides of the political spectrum, recently teamed up to write an Op Ed essay sounding the alarm," concluded Navasky. "Such small political journals –- which, by the way, carry the most discourse –- bear the heaviest rate increases. The unpopular ideas and opinions that these journals propagate and circulate today often turn out to be tomorrow's wisdom. They act as intellectual and political gadflies, they prod their larger and staider colleagues, they question conformity and complacency. By helping them recover from the grievous wound inflicted upon by the recent rate increase, this Committee will have deepened and strengthened our democracy."