Second-Class Postage and the Death of the Small-Run Magazines

By Steve Delahoyde on February 26, 2008 9:03 AM

An interesting discussion on the site BerlinBites, found by way of rc3, entitled “A Death in the Family and (Maybe) Some Hope.” It’s about the recent increase in second-class postage rates and the damage its having on small-run magazines, driving many out of business entirely, forcing them to go online-only, or beginning to chip away at their already very slim bottom line. The post talks primarily about the magazines No Depression and Resonance, which have folded recently due to the increased rates, but through those, it speaks to the industry as a whole. In an era where even keeping a magazine with huge base of readers is difficult to keep afloat, how is the cool little guy to survive? So if you’re a fan of a particular magazine, design or otherwise, it’s probably not a bad idea to check in with their website, before discovering it’s stopped appearing at your local shop. Here’s a bit from the story about the rate increase itself:

…as someone who’s worked with magazines my whole life, second-class postage is a big, big deal. It’s the mechanism which allows you to send your print-run to your subscribers for a tiny fraction of what it would cost to mail them first class, and it carries a bunch of restrictions: you’ve only got a couple of days to get your magazines out, for one thing, and missing a couple of those deadlines means you lose your second-class license.

The new rates, though, were bizarre: the more magazines you shipped, the less each unit cost, and smaller-circulation magazines were burdened with unreasonably higher per-unit costs, instead of everyone paying the same rate. But that’s what happens when you allow big business to write the laws.