7 Magazine Web Sites That Suck

When it comes to the internet, in Touch Weekly looks pretty out of touch.

The gossip sheet’s web site was rated dead last among 87 major-magazine web sites in a study released a few days ago by L2, a “think tank for digital innovation”, and New York University’s business school. in Touch’s site scored a “Digital IQ” of 32, suggesting its intelligence is somewhere in the range of  “Deliverance” characters or maybe the NBC executives who canceled “Star Trek".

I’m no web designer (in case you hadn’t noticed), but the in Touch site does have a late 1990s “Guess what? We’re now on the Internet!” look to it.

It’s hard to tell the ads from the articles, except the ads are even tackier. There’s no search option or even any sections to click on. Navigation? Try the little “Next Page” link at the bottom.

The message seems to be “Now that you’ve wasted a few minutes on this site, go out and buy the real magazine. And we mean the printed magazine; we don’t need no stinkin’ apps or ebook versions.”

News reports about the L2 study focused on Time – whose business model has been devastated by the web – being the only magazine rated “genius” (Digital IQ = 140). But for a snarky blogger, focusing on the bottom of the list is more fun, and perhaps more revealing.

Here are the seven sites that L2 rated Feeble (“Investment does not match opportunity”), along with their Digital IQ, L2’s description, the title’s owner, its Alexa.com rank for U.S. web traffic, and Dead Tree Edition's commentary:

1) in Touch Weekly: 32; “A lot of opportunity to improve”; Bauer. Alexa rank: 10,559. Come on, how about a link for "Stars in rehab" and another for "Stars out of rehab"?

2) Town & Country: 43; “Is anyone home?”; Hearst. Alexa rank: 202,907. That low rank means it gets less traffic than the Web sites of much smaller-circulation magazines, such as those of Folio: and Publishing Executive. Why? Because there's basically no content, just ads and promotions.

3) Men’s Journal: 52; “No daily blog and spotty incorporation of video content”. Alexa rank: 12,901.Very clean design that's inviting to readers but apparently not to advertisers. And who needs blogs anyway?

4) Star: 55; “The last to know”; American Media. Alexa rank:12,601. Actually not a bad site if you enjoy looking at pictures instead of, like, reading actual sentences.

5) Elle Décor: 59; “Designer Registry mentions drive Facebook wall conversation away from core readership” (Editor’s note: English translation not provided.); Hachette (now part of Hearst). Alexa rank: 7,137. Nice design, good content, easy to follow. What's the problem?

6) Muscle & Fitness: 64; “Ninety-pound weakling”; American Media. Alexa rank: 31,451. "Oh look, gaudy photos of barely legal 'nutritional supplements' and the people who abuse them!"

7) Traditional Home: 69; “Uploaded ad images are not traditional, just outdated”; Meredith. Alexa rank: 20,019. For people who like traditional designs in their homes but not on web sites.

USPS Seeks Special January Rate Increases

The U.S. Postal Service is seeking permission to implement “exigent” rate increases in January averaging more than 4% on most classes of mail.

In a filing with the Postal Regulatory Commission this week, USPS asked for the ability to implement the special rate increases, along with the usual inflation-based price increases, to make up for the volume it lost during the recent recession. The PRC rejected a similar 2010 attempt to impose exigent increases of about 5.6%, but is reconsidering that ruling at the direction of a federal court

“The Postal Service suffered financial harm directly associated with extraordinary and exceptional volume losses that the [inflation-based] price cap mechanism is incapable of addressing,” the USPS brief in the case says. “The Postal Service respectfully requests that the Commission recognize $2.34 billion as a plausible lower-bound estimate of the Postal Service’s financial harm ‘due to’ recession-related volume losses in FY2008 and FY2009, and approve exigent increases (for January 2012 implementation) on that basis.”

To yield $2.3 billion annually, the rate increases on the market-dominant classes of mail -- such as First Class, Standard, and Periodicals -- would have to average at least 4.2%. USPS did not specify exactly how rates would change, only that it wants increases that would bring in an additional $2.3 billion in revenue.

But mailers groups don’t think the court order means the Postal Service should get another crack at rate increases that exceed the rate of inflation.

“The court left in place the Commission’s findings that the Postal Service had submitted no evidence indicating that its request was causally related to the recession, and that the Postal Service’s financial problems were caused in large part by longstanding structural issues, not the recession,” says a joint filing by four industry groups.

The Postal Service brief notes that USPS is in even worse shape now that when it filed the original request for exigent increases last year:

“The contribution lost as a result of the massive volume declines, including volumes lost because of the recession, has not returned, and, based on volume projections, is unlikely to return. The injection of additional revenue from this increase is also critically important to ensuring the continuation of mail service. The Postal Service lost $15.1 billion over the FY2008-FY2010 period, will lose approximately $9 billion this year, and will soon exhaust its statutory borrowing authority. The Postal Service currently expects to run out of money to pay its employees and suppliers sometime next year, thereby risking a shutdown in mail service. The additional revenue from this increase would help to delay that date, and is therefore clearly ‘necessary’ to ‘enable the Postal Service…to maintain and continue the development of postal services of the kind and quality adapted to the needs of the United States.’”

Related articles:

• Court Decision May Lead to Hike in Postal Rates: Why a federal appeals court sent the original case back to the PRC. 
• Could the Deficit-Reduction Deal Limit Postal Pay Raises and Rate Increases?: Congress has toyed with changing how the inflation rate is calculated, which could lower the price cap on most postage rates.

The Line Between Newspaper Publishers and Commercial Printers Continues to Blur

Two announcements within the past week demonstrate that some newspaper publishers are increasingly viewing printing as a profit center while others take the opposite tack and shut down their printing operations.

The Chicago Sun-Times revealed Tuesday that it will become the second major metropolitan daily in the U.S. to outsource all of its printing. But rather than turning production over to a commercial printer, as the San Francisco Chronicle did, the Sun-Times will entrust its printing to the rival Chicago Tribune starting in late September.

The next day, Baldwin Technology Company announced that is has sold UV dryers that will be installed on two newspaper presses in Australia "to significantly improve print quality and enable use of a wider range of paper qualities." In other words, the presses will be able to do heatset offset printing on such higher-grade stocks as coated and supercalendered papers as well as lower-quality coldset printing on newsprint.

As demand for printed newspapers has shrunk in recent years, publishers have more idle time on their presses and less ability to justify investing in new presses. Increasingly, they will either turn their printing over to others or chase after outside printing work to justify the investments needed to keep their printing operations up to date.

The Sun-Times's shift will save it an estimated $10 million annually, partly because it can narrow the paper's width, and will provide more ability to run color ads, according to a Chicago Tribune article. The Tribune plant already produces Chicago editions of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal but has enough capacity to take on the Sun-Times and seven suburban Sun-Times papers apparently without breaking a sweat.

Newspapers & Technology lists 20 closures of newspaper printing plants this year because of outsourcing to other newspapers. And there are increasing reports of newspaper publishers going after work that used to be done by commercial printers.

Baldwin's announcement suggests commercial printers can expect to see even more competition from newspaper publishers. Rather than the sort of multimillion-dollar investments in new presses for the San Francisco Chronicle plant, Baldwin is adding heatset as an option to the Australian presses for only $375,000 per press.

For its technology, which was originally developed for sheetfed presses, Baldwin envisions "further opportunities as printers around the world add flexibility and quality improvement to their production capabilities."

For further reading: Newspaper Production Enters Colorful, Outsourced Era and Can Transcon transform newspapers?, which explain why the San Francisco Chronicle plant and a similar facility in Montreal are so significant for both the newspaper and printing industries.

Could the Deficit-Reduction Deal Limit Postal Pay Raises and Rate Increases?

An apparently unintended consequence of the proposed bipartisan "Gang of Six" deficit-reduction deal is that it could reduce future inflation-based increases in U.S. Postal Service wages and rates.

One section of the plan calls for a "shift to the chained-CPI (a more accurate measure of inflation) government-wide starting in 2012" to calculate changes in inflation. The document adds that, "According to CBO [the Congressional Budget Office], the shift to chained-CPI would result in the annual adjustment growing, on average, about 0.25 percentage points per year slower than the current CPI."

CPI, which comes in such variants as CPI-U and CPI-W, is the Consumer Price Index, which is used to determine cost-of-living adjustments (COLAs) for most USPS employees and to cap rate increases on the vast majority of mail, such as First Class, Standard (direct mail and catalogs), and Periodicals. A difference of 0.25% would probably translate to an impact of more than $100 million annually on both postal wages and postage rates.

Chained-CPI is a method for calculating inflation that takes into account people's tendency to substitute a less expensive item.

"One of the problems of inflation is it doesn't account for the fact that when the price of apples goes up, you buy oranges or bananas," Marc Goldwein, a chained-CPI advocate, told NPR. The Gang of Six would use chained-CPI to lessen cost-of-living increases for programs like Social Security.

The proposal does not specify whether chained-CPI would just be an alternative method of measuring inflation -- which would not affect union contracts or the rate-cap law that specify CPI-W or CPI-U -- or whether it would become the new method of calculating CPI-W and CPI-U. The "government-wide" reference suggests that, even if CPI-U is left as is, there could be a push to change the rate-cap law so that it refers to chained-CPI rather than CPI-U.