We're Number 5! We're Number 5! -- Recent Honors for Dead Tree Edition

The new Web site Printing's Best Blogs officially launched today with Dead Tree Edition as one of the three featured "Mailing/Postal" blogs, the second such honor this blog has attained in recent months.

I can't really complain about Dead Tree Edition being pigeon-holed into the postal category because lately I have been writing more about the U.S. Postal Service than any other subject. And this blog doesn't fit into any of the other categories at the Web site, which is owned by North American Publishing Company (publisher of Printing Impressions and Publishing Executive).

Besides, my little blog (average of just under 1,000 visitors daily) is in good company. Both of the other featured postal blogs -- Courier, Express, and Postal Observer and Postalnews Blog -- have great track records and  published dynamite stories today on post office closings.

At Courier, Express, and Postal Observer, Alan Robinson managed to catching both The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal with their pants down by pointing out that their recent sob stories about the closing of small-town post offices were mostly off base. Alan bothered to do something that the mainstream-media reporters apparently didn't -- actually read through the list of the 2,000 money-losing post offices that USPS has proposed for closure -- to find that the closings would "affect the nation's urban centers and have minimal impact on service to rural America."

Meanwhile, Postalnews Blog noted that it's not easy to define when a post office is losing money.

The other honor came four months ago, when noted industry commentator Patrick Henry named Dead Tree Edition #5 in his list of Top 10 blogs for printers and publishers. He also called me "an investigative journalist", which sounds a lot better than "a frustrated magazine-industry production guy who thinks he's a journalist because he once took a journalism course."

Again, Dead Tree Edition is in good company. Number 1 on Henry's list is Gordon Pritchard's Quality in Print, which is a phenomenal resource for printers and print buyers. Anyone who thinks bloggers are just people who sit around in their pajamas firing off ignorant comments and creating tacky-looking Web sites should check out Gordo's work.

(Disclosure: I'm not writing this in my pajamas, but I am wearing a bathrobe. And, please, no comments about tacky-looking blogs.)

Other articles about Dead Tree Edition:

• Interview with D. Eadward Tree, Chief Arborist at Dead Tree Edition: Deborah Corn attempts to "reveal the man behind the tree" and whether he really lives in Hawaii.
• Dead Tree Edition Tops Twitter and the World Cup: RISI shocks Mr. Tree (and the entire paper industry) by naming D. Eadward Tree #43 on its "Power List" of the industry's movers and shakers. Mr. Tree also reveals how he once thought he'd found a real job for Prince Charles.
• USPS Retirements and Staffing Changes Captured Readers' Attention in 2010: OK, enough already with this self-congratulation and self-promotion. A review of this blog's articles last year revealed two different times when he had to eat crow.