Dead-Tree Editions Are Dying, But Dead Tree Edition Lives

The pandemic has been death for dead-tree-edition periodicals, but other types of print are doing just fine. 

Direct mail, for example, is as relevant as ever, as I explained in an article published last week by Printing Impressions. (Yes, it really is based on a true story.) Marketing mail can do things that other media, whether old or new, simply cannot match. 

The “hoax” that will disappear as soon as warm weather arrives has kept things busy at plants that print books, boxes, and floor graphics as well. Likewise, Dead Tree Edition is undergoing a transformation. Turning over a new leaf, you might say. The seed dies, but from it springs new life. 

My six-year stint writing the monthly View from the Tree column for Publishing Executive has come to an end. Almost simultaneously, PubExec and its rival, Folio:, went silent at the end of June, both victims of their heavy reliance on live events. 

When the two publications went all digital a few years ago, we mourned that there was no longer a magazine that covered the U.S. magazine industry. Now there’s no longer even a web publisher that focuses solely on the U.S. magazine-media industry. 

But Mr. Tree is just fine. I’ll now be writing regularly for Printing Impressions, the leading trade publication for the U.S. printing industry. I’m no stranger to its audience because it has often republished my articles that first appeared in it sibling, PubExec. 

In fact, four years of my PubExec columns have now been re-posted at Printing Impressions. The last one was about the U.S. Postal Service; I have a feeling I'll be writing a few more of those.

Those who are gluttons for punishment can still find the full collection, stretching back to 2011 before the column became a regular gig, at PubExec.

What Is the Easy Path to Publishing Riches Overnight? A Delusion

Dead Tree Edition: the early days

When I started this blog a decade ago this month, the Get Rich By Blogging Hype Machine was just getting revved up.

Within a few years, pundits declared that blogging is dead, just as they had declared that “Print is dead” a few years earlier. (Both media have shown an annoying tendency to flash a giant middle finger at the pundits, adapting rather than extincting.)

Meanwhile, the bloggers who had been trying to make money from consulting to other bloggers had moved on – to become, I suppose, black-hat SEO experts, then white-hat SEO consultants, then social-media marketers, content marketers, or whatever the current shiny new title is for the buzzards who feed on greed and insecurity in the online world. (Other than “Facebook executives”, that is.)

So when I looked back over the biggest publishing delusions of the past decade for my recent “Decade of Delusions” article for Publishing Executive, the easy-money-from-blogging delusion didn’t make the cut. The blogosphere’s version of the Pets.com sock puppet no longer seemed relevant to the publishing world in general.

People eat this stuff up
(Note to other publishers: It turns out that people love reading about how self-appointed experts got it wrong.. I’ve been amazed by the overwhelmingly favorable, and insightful, reactions to the “Decade of Delusions” article. Whatever your beat, consider publishing a list of recently exposed delusions and false prophecies on the subject.)

But I subsequently realized that the delusion hasn’t died, just morphed into other forms that can generally be categorized as “Just put it out there and watch it go viral.” For example, "Follow the secret formula for getting on the first page of Google." Or "Make a fortune by pivoting to video because no one wants to, like, read words any more."

And "Put your messages on Facebook because everyone’s on Facebook." (I know a store owner who literally drove her business into the ground by following this strategy. She put all of her limited marketing budget into creating Facebook promotions when she would have been better off with a bit of advertising and using her email list properly. Turns out “everyone” on Facebook avoids self-serving promotions like the plague.)

Book-publishing guru Jane Friedman recently advised fellow authors to stop trying to turn their books into best sellers: “It seems counterintuitive, but rather than seeking a broad audience, you should focus on a narrow one.”

Building your tribe
That’s good advice for anyone trying to build an audience. Unless you have a huge following or huger financial resources, the path to success usually starts with focusing on an under-served niche and finding, or building, a “tribe” of people with similar passions. Create a book, blog, magazine, web site, video, podcast, or whatever that serves your tribe's needs better than anyone else does. The tribe will decide if you're ready for a larger audience -- and will help you get there.

LinkedIn has done more for Dead Tree Edition than Facebook has. Sure, every once in a while someone with a big Facebook following posts a link to one of my articles, and it goes viral. But that doesn’t build a sustainable audience.

The page views from posts on LinkedIn groups are typically anemic. And God knows LinkedIn keeps revamping its groups in ways that seem designed to discourage participation. But much of the Dead Tree Edition tribe discovered this blog via relevant LinkedIn groups. They keep coming back, keep recommending my articles to others, and sometimes complain that I’m not publishing as often as I used to do. Twitter has worked similarly, doing more to build the tribe than to drive clicks.

Good old-fashioned email has been my most effective social medium -- not email blasts but rather personal emails to editors and other influencers pointing out a particular article that might interest their audience. And sometimes exchanging information with them. Getting referrals from them has brought new followers and has enabled Dead Tree Edition to do pretty well on search engines despite zero focus on search-engine optimization.

Fortunately, I started blogging not to get rich but because I wanted to understand better how the web works and because some topics weren’t getting the coverage they needed. Blogging can demonstrate your expertise, gain you new friends and business contacts, boost your personal brand, and lead to writing and speaking engagements (unless you stubbornly insist on remaining anonymous).

But if you’re just looking for a way to make money in your spare time, you’ll find that delivering pizzas is more lucrative.

Other recent Dead Tree Edition articles about publishing include:

• A Spanking New Savior for Printed Magazines: Stormy Daniels
• Once Considered Mortal Enemies, Print & Digital Are Living Happily Together
• Wait! Don't Kill That Magazine: 4 Ways To Rescue A Struggling Publication

 

What Is a Dead Tree Edition? 7 Ways the Meaning Has Evolved

To celebrate the seventh birthday of the “Dead Tree Edition” blog this month, here’s a look back at how the meaning of the phrase “dead tree edition” has changed since October 2008.

The "experts" concluded that the Web
had blasted a fatal hole in print.

Since the early days of the Internet, “dead tree edition” has been slang for a printed publication, but the phrase no longer carries the baggage it used to. Linguists would say that the phrase’s denotation is little changed but that the connotations are vastly different.

In 2003, William R. Tracey wrote succinctly that the phrase was “derogatory cyberspeak for the paper version of a periodical that appears in both paper and electronic (Internet) forms.” “Dead” highlighted what the digerati thought printed periodicals soon would be, and “tree” underscored the supposed environmental horrors of turning a renewable resource into a product.

The meaning was largely unchanged five years later when this blog was launched, at a time when a digital-only publication promoting print media was still an ironic oddity. The name was meant as a badge of honor: “Yeah, I’m a print geek; you gotta problem with that?” But some folks in the traditional publishing and printing industries were not amused. (See “Can You Trust an Anonymous Blog with an Aggravating Name?")

Not dead yet:The wound wasn't fatal. New
shoots and leaves demonstrate print's vitality.

Here are seven ways the phrase’s meaning has changed since October of 2008:

1) Books: The most obvious change is that “dead tree edition” now includes books, not just periodicals. E-books had been around in some form for years. But they didn’t start making a splash – and spurring the inevitable predictions that they would soon put Gutenberg out of business -- until the Kindle 2 was introduced in 2009.

2) Digital publications: Back in 2008, many of us ink-on-paper types worried that digital editions would soon replace printed ones. It’s not happening. Printed daily newspapers are withering away, but not because people are switching to digital newspapers. Digital magazines (as opposed to the web sites of magazines) have mostly been an overhyped bust, especially now that smartphones have largely usurped tablets. E-book sales grew exponentially for a few years, then plateaued at somewhere around 20% to 30% of the book market.

3) Human nature: Publishers used to assume that once people “went digital,” they would never go back to print. Human behavior turned out not to be so black and white. People who wouldn’t think of getting their news from a newspaper rather than their phone see nothing incongruous about leaning back with a fashion or hobbyist magazine. Consumers who load up their Kindles with novels and biographies still seem to turn to print for other genres of books. A few folks are print or digital diehards; everyone else expects digital when they want digital and print when they want print.

4) Greenwash: Consumers are far more aware these days that electronic devices host a plethora of hazardous materials and that the “coal-fired Internet” consumes massive amounts of power. Many a company has dropped its “go green, go paperless” promotions of digital alternatives, knowing that its dubious claims won’t stand up to an in-depth environmental assessment or challenges from the likes of Two Sides. And perhaps more people now realize that paper manufacturing more often discourages deforestation than causing it.

5) “Dead tree” magazines forgot to die: In 2008, magazines were widely predicted to be headed down the same toilet that was (and still is) swallowing the newspaper business. But a funny thing happened on the way to oblivion: Magazine publishers transformed into “magazine media” companies, sporting leaner and more niche-oriented print brands that acted as launching pads for successful digital ventures. Gone are the glory days of huge newsstand sales and bloated, advertising-subsidized circulation. Yet magazines have found their place in the multimedia publishing world as premium products that deliver steady profits.

6) The digital-media business is no picnic: Digital products were supposed to liberate publishers from the old evils of paper prices, postal rates, and "expect 6 to 8 weeks for delivery." But instead of a new utopia, we've wandered into a strange land full of its own ills -- low ad rates, banner blindness, ad blockers, and a continuing scramble to keep current with technology. And don't forget such lurking monsters as Google, Facebook, and Apple that can bankrupt publishers with a single change of algorithm or policy. Compared to pop-ups, interstitials, and other effluents that are desperately trying to monetize page views, the good old right-hand ad page facing a left-hand editorial page looks like pretty nifty technology.

7) Digital needs print: Publishing people used to have silly debates about print (“It’s dead”) versus digital (“turning dollars into dimes”), but find that such either/or thinking doesn’t fit the real world. Web sites that are associated with a respected print publication have a huge competitive advantage over those that don’t, especially in fields where credibility and search engines are crucial. Many publishers find that the economics of long-form journalism (what we used to call “articles”) don’t work on the web unless there’s a print publication that helps cover the costs.

Related articles:

• Google Loves Print, This We Know, For Its Guidelines Tell Us So
• A Kick in the Listicles: 7 Reasons Digital Media Are Inferior to Print 
• Are Printed Magazines Growing or Shrinking? Yes 

Dead Tree Edition's Best and Worst of 2013 (It's About Damned Time!)

In honor of the first day of spring, and in solidarity with procrastinators everywhere, we hereby present the Best and Worst of Dead Tree Edition in 2013:

• The Stats: 200,800 visits, according to Google Analytics, with 272,070 page views, 123,625 unique visitors, and an average visit lasting 1 minute and 1 second. Lesson: Take any claims about "unique visitors" with a grain of salt; if there were indeed just over 200,000 visits last year, there's no way the number of people who came to the blog was anywhere close to 123,000.
• Most Popular Article: USPS Comes Up With Yet Another Way to Discourage Early Retirement, with over 10,000 views. That article prompted the blog's first-ever rebuttal from the Postal Service, USPS Responds To Criticism of Its Annuity Estimates.
• Least Popular Article: Publishing Wisdom From Across the Pond. Not a bad little article, but without pickups by other web sites Dead Tree Edition gets very little traffic.
• Best Comments:Viagra in a Printing Plant? What's Up with That?, which inspired creative use of such printing terms as stiffness, bulk, pumps, hickies, and rubber rejuvenator. "A true printer will do it without wrinkling the sheets," millergraphics opined. But b4d guessed that "Dude has been in a depressed funk ever since his hot wife told him she can take care of her needs 'digitally', as opposed to the conventional way with an offset pressman." 
• Best Use of Social Media: The Takeover of Paperless 2013, in which Dead Tree Edition played only a bit part.
• Worst Use of Social Media:Almost Live, From the Cutting Edge of Publishing. Hey, you've got to be willing to experiment, and then to pull the plug when the experiment doesn't work. That's why there were no sequels to this article, which covered only one day of a three-day conference.
• Best Lists: First, there was Nine Ways the Postal Service Is Not Like a Real Business, which with the help of readers was followed up by 17 More Ways USPS Is Not Like a Real Business and then by another USPS rebuttal.
• Best Apology: My Heartfelt Apology to the Publishing Industry, which was a big hit with some sarcasm fans who reside in The Flyover.
• Biggest Scoop: New Postal Incentive Could Backfire for Mailers, which revealed that USPS's proposed Technology Credit for mailers was actually an attempt to get a permanent, back-door price increase. Postal officials withdrew the proposal a month later.
• Biggest Non-Scoop: On the 5th Birthday of Dead Tree Edition, It's Time To Reveal the Real D. Eadward Tree
• Biggest Slacker: D. Eadward Tree, who only published 57 blog posts in 2013 versus 90 in 2012, after peaking at 158 in 2010.

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.

USPS Retirements and Staffing Changes Captured Readers' Attention in 2010

Criticism of the U.S. Postal Service's abundance of supervisors, problems with its retirement process, and possible shifts in its workforce were among the items of greatest interest to Dead Tree Edition readers this year.

The 10 most popular articles this year were all about the Postal Service, led by USPS Has Too Many Supervisors And Too Many Employees, Congressman Says with more than 18,000 page views and 1,140 hours on page. The Oct. 2 article (and its Oct. 16 follow-up, ranked #3 in popularity) became more significant a month later when the election made Rep. Darrell Issa the next chairman of the House committee overseeing the Postal Service.

Interest among postal workers concerning how their jobs might change showed up in high readership for  USPS May Split Role of Letter Carrier By Creating "100% Street" Routes (ranked #2), Postal Service Plans to Use More Part-Time Employees (#6), and GAO Suggests Plant Closings, Two-Tiered Wage Structure for USPS (#7).

Concerns about practices that discourage USPS retirements showed up in the #4 ranking for Why Does USPS Make Retiring Difficult When It Has So Many Excess Employees? Tough Question #5 and #5 for How Does the Postal Service Discourage Early Retirement? Let Me Count the Ways.

Rounding out the Top 10 were Potter Quitting the Worst CEO Job in America, FSS Machines Shuffled Again -- But Do They Work?, and perennial favorite The Unofficial Guide to Flats Sequencing, which has been updated several times since its original publication nearly two years ago.

As for non-postal articles, readers spent the most time with NewPage Does The Curley Shuffle (Was it the article or the Three Stooges clip that drew them in?), Is Bankruptcy Inevitable for NewPage?, IRS Brings Son of Black Liquor Back From the Dead; Ruling May Be Worth Billions to U.S. Pulp Makers, and Newspapers Are Greener Than Web News, Says Environmental Expert.

While we're looking back on the year, allow me to walk you through the highlights and low points for Dead Tree Edition:

January: Dead Tree Edition reports that the regulations governing USPS price caps don't seem to anticipate the sort of deflation that occurred in 2010: "What is not clear is how the rate cap for 2011 will be calculated." Nine months later, the Postal Service realizes the regulations are not clear and asks the Postal Regulatory Commission how to calculate the rate cap for 2011.

February: D. Eadward Tree eats crow when newsprint manufacturer White Birch goes Chapter 11.

March: This blog breaks the news that publicly traded U.S. pulp manufacturers chalked up $6.5 billion in black liquor tax credits during 2009. Various media outlets have subsequently used that number without attribution. Are we really supposed to believe that they dug through the SEC filings of 21 companies to verify that the number was correct? Or is there a new rule of reporting that says you can rely on information from an anonymous blog as long as you don't cite it as the source?

April: We celebrate Earth Day by recommending the use of genuine Amazonian rubber condoms and the firing of Smokey the Bear.

May: The Associated Press distributes an article that for the first time quotes Dead Tree Edition as a source, in this case regarding a quarterly loss for Quad/Graphics. Someone wasn't paying attention to the new rules for citing anonymous blogs. (See March.)

June: Mr. Tree is named #43 on RISI's Power List of movers and shakers in the global paper industry. Still in shock, he reveals how he once confused parasitic wasps with parasitic WASPs.

July: Once again, Mr. Tree is found eating crow, this time after the IRS made "Son of Black Liquor" tax credits possible. He's still trying to figure out how the IRS determined that a "fuel meets the EPA registration requirements if the EPA does not require the fuel to be registered."

August: Print Media Centr's Deborah Corn, the Barbara Walters of the printing industry, publishes an extensive interview with Mr. Tree that delves into rumors that he lives in Hawaii.

September: A publisher offers Mr. Tree some actual money to write a series of articles in 2011. Stay tuned.

October: USPS announces that Pat Donahoe, whose double life as Mr. Tree had been exposed only five months earlier, will be the new Postmaster General.

November: Popular publishing analyst BoSacks' email newsletter says "my e-friend D. Eadward Tree has some of his usual excellent observations about our industry and the new magazine apps," referring to the article that introduced a new term -- app-oplexy. BoSacks responds to the resulting inquiries by insisting he doesn't know Mr. Tree's real identity. (Psst, don't tell Bo that his wife writes most of this blog's articles during his infamous poker games.)

December: Mr. Tree is so burned out that he goes nine days without publishing an article, then ends the hiatus with a rehash of what he previously published during the year. Hey, this Postmaster General thing is hard work.

D. Eadward Tree Unmasked!

A postal executive stunned the Mailers Technical Advisory Committee (MTAC) today by announcing that D. Eadward Tree, pseudonymous chief arborist of Dead Tree Edition, is actually a high-ranking Postal Service official.

Rosa Fulton, Executive Director of Flats Sequencing, said that the Flats Sequencing Map published on this blog last month had only been shown to a few high-ranking USPS officials. She announced, therefore, that D. Eadward Tree must be none other than Patrick R. Donahoe, the #2 man at the U.S. Postal Service. Donahoe reportedly laughed but issued no denials.

Ms. Fulton's "revelation" also drew chuckles from those who had read this blog's criticisms of several Postal Service programs, such as the rechristening of the Intelligent Mail barcode as the FUBAR code.

Confession: That super-secret FSS map was part of a presentation to a meeting of mailers in March that was then posted on a USPS web site.

I've been called many things before -- DeadTree, Mr. Tree, Tree Dude, His Pseudonym-ness, an executive at several prominent publishing companies, that anonymous blogger with the aggravating name, an irritating #&*%#$ -- but never Pat Donahoe.

Here are a couple of clues: Yes, I have a day job, but my salary is less than Mr. Donahoe's.

Can You Trust an Anonymous Blog with an Aggravating Name?

An anonymous commenter took Audience Development to task today for quoting yesterday's article in Dead Tree Edition about Source Interlink.

"Why would you quote an anonymous blog especially one named Dead Tree Edition," wrote "Publisher" on the magazine's Web site. "That was clever the first time or two I heard it but it is old devisive (sic) and aggravating."

Audience Development quoted Dead Tree Edition because it values service to its readers above its institutional ego. Its reporting about the filing yesterday, like the other reporting in the mainstream media, omitted the tidbit that publishers are among Source Interlink's major creditors. Bucking a long journalistic tradition of pooh-poohing others' scoops, AD rectified that omission today by citing Dead Tree Edition and by providing some additional details on Source's filing.

Did it worry that it was quoting an unidentified source whose credibility could not be checked? No, because it could verify what I wrote by digging into court documents.

The editors could also verify the trustworthiness of other Dead Tree Edition reporting -- for example, by calling the old "Corrugated Recycles" phone number and finding out it really has been taken over by a telephone-sex service. Or, for a more recent example, by reading Postcom.org's item today about the U.S. Postal Service moving forward with plans for a "Summer Sale", as Dead Tree Edition revealed two weeks ago.

And now for that aggravating name. "Dead Tree Edition" is what the digerati use to describe ink-on-paper publications. I adopted the phrase as this Web site's brand name to communicate that the focus would be on printed publications in an age of Web mania -- and to show that we print geeks have a sense of humor too.

I won't run from the dead-tree moniker. I have an odd fascination for that stuff that comes from dead trees known as paper, and I still love to read a well-crafted newspaper or magazine. (Yes, I'm aware of the irony of saying that in a Web-only blog.)

In my alter ego as D. Eadward Tree (Chief Arborist of Dead Tree Edition), I have attempted to be a friend to printed publications, providing tips and insights as well as being an advocate on postal and environmental issues.

"Trees are a crop -- like corn," "Publisher" writes. "Don't you eat dead corn?"

Yes, I do, and I agree with your point. Even the occasional reader of Dead Tree Edition can see that I don't buy the notions that using dead trees to make publications is necessarily bad or that putting the same content into a digital format is necessarily greener.

Dead trees are our friends.