Here is an article from Meg Weaver's excellent Wooden Horse Magazine's Newsletter. Yet another indication that day by day, Americans cease to live in a country, but rather inside one big business.Scary.
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Dear readers,
Publisher Time Warner has a secret weapon - the US post office.
Wanting to squeeze even more profits from their magazines, Time Warner called in the bean counters and must have told them to look at the postal rates. How could Time Warner avoid the 2007 11.7% postal increase that had been announced in 2006? The bean counters went to work.
In February 2007, the Postal Regulatory Commission rejected the proposal from the US Postal Service and accepted a fee increase strategy based on a complex proposal submitted by...you guessed it, Time Warner.
The USPS then allowed just eight business days for formal responses to the 758-page proposal. On March 19, the fee increase was a fact - to go into effect July 15.
The publishers groaned and tried desperately to figure out how much more they had to pay. Time Warner sold off 18 of their magazines to some hapless Swedes in the Bonnier Group.
One by one, the publishers discovered that the smaller your circulation, the more you had to pay. The postal increase was not the same for everybody. In fact, if you were the largest publisher in the country and had magazines with circulations that allowed you to sort and bundle by carrier routes and then palletize everything and shrink wrap it, you paid less. Smaller magazines that couldn't reach the quantities required to bundle and palletize would pay much more.
Never mind that the post office is a government body whose rate structure for the last two hundred years had been to "facilitate and encourage the dissemination of information and ensure a thriving marketplace of ideas." All ideas. Not only those with mega-ciculation.
So, if you are a magazine like NATIONAL REVIEW, THE AMERICAN PROSPECT, SOJOURNERS, THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE, WORLD MAGAZINE, THE CHRISTIAN CENTURY, COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW, or REASON, you were hit with an increase many times the Time Warner's. In fact, The Nation figured they had to come up with an additional $500,000 this year.
But free speech seems still to be treasured in the United States. The Nation has so far received $271,000 in donations towards its goal of paying that half mill!
Write your representative to have the fee hike repealed.
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