"Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one." – A.J. Liebling
Ben Scott had better things to do than listen to a bunch of little magazines rant about their unreasonable postage bills. As the policy director of Free Press, a group that specialized in fighting media concentration, he and 10 co-workers in Washington were wrapped up in defending internet accessibility. But in late February 2007, Scott's phone started buzzing with accusations from panicked publishers of small-circulation magazines. The United States Postal Service, they said, was hammering the last nail in the coffin of independent publishing.
Periodicals with circulations of fewer than 250,000 (some with much fewer—even in the hundreds) had just discovered that the rates they paid the USPS for postage were about to skyrocket, and they had only eight business days to dispute the proposed increase. While these independent publishers had expected the rates to rise, they believed it would be by about 12 percent, which had been the USPS' own suggestion. However, during an arduous 10 months of hearings on postal rates in 2006, during which the small-magazine community was conspicuously absent, the stakes changed dramatically.
Instead of a simple markup, the entire rate system was overhauled, imposing a cost-based structure on a branch of government originally established to provide a public good, one that the Founding Fathers deemed vital to our democratic society. The Postal System was built on the premise of promoting the free flow of ideas by giving preferential treatment to their most common method of conveyance: the printed pages of periodicals.
Of particular concern to Free Press was the discovery that the biggest force behind the formula by which rates were to be increased was none other than Time Warner, the largest magazine publisher in the United States, which had been working overtime to influence the outcome of the hearings.
At the receiving end of Time Warner's proposal was the Postal Regulatory (formerly Rate) Commission, the independent board of overseers responsible for holding the rate hearings. The new suggested rate system changed from a flat rate per pound, like a stamp for a first-class letter that costs the same no matter how far the letter travels within the United States, to a new piece-by-piece rate, like determining how much the stamp should cost based on how difficult it would be to deliver the letter. The new formula was so complex that most publishers could not initially give Scott exact numbers for their anticipated rate increases, but they knew enough to fear for their continued existence. When the dust settled and the facts came out, the average increase for all of Time Warner's 127 titles was 10 percent; rate increases for most small-circulation magazines were two or three times that, and in some cases, more than five times as much.
Journals of opinion, the idea-laden niche that has hewed closest to the Founding Fathers' conception of the kind of periodicals whose availability would benefit our fledgling democracy, collected rate-increase data among themselves as soon as they had hard figures. American Conservative, a biweekly magazine with a circulation of 13,000, faced an increase of 58 percent. Eagle Publishing, producer of Human Events, paid the USPS an additional $211,000 in 2007. Jack Fowler, publisher of National Review, was so incensed that he co-authored an editorial in The Los Angeles Times with Teresa Stack, president of The Nation, denouncing the rate hikes. Like National Review, its strange bedfellow The Nation faced an additional $500,000 on its 2007 postal bill. The New Republic and The New York Review of Books each faced increases in excess of 15 percent. Recently Alan Chin, general manager of The New Republic, said the extra postage costs forced them to tighten belts across the budget and seriously consider switching to lighter paper stock.
For Free Press and the coalition of small political magazines, the issue extended beyond paper and percentages, beyond the survival of a few dozen journals of opinion and even beyond the futures of several thousand small-circulation publications. What was most in danger of going bankrupt was the circulation of ideas, information and opinions, which the old preferential rates for periodicals intended to promote.
- more -
No comments:
Post a Comment