On the 5th Birthday of Dead Tree Edition, It's Time To Reveal the Real D. Eadward Tree

Five years and 601 articles ago today, a magazine-publishing veteran took on the identity of D. Eadward Tree and launched the Dead Tree Edition blog.

Rarely has the blog focused on Mr. Tree himself, under the assumption that the 700,000-plus unique visitors (some more unique than others) who have visited over the years were looking mostly for advice, insight, or maybe even entertainment. But the true identity of Mr. Tree has become a subject of great speculation and discussion in some publishing and printing circles, prompting a few of the blog’s followers to request that Dead Tree Edition celebrate its fifth birthday by spilling the beans.

A thorough reading of all 601 of those articles provides many hints as to Mr. Tree’s identity. It’s also a great cure for insomnia, unless you are that rare bird who happens to share all of Mr. Tree’s obsessions – such as making print more environmentally friendly, getting accurate benefits information to potential U.S. Postal Service retirees, reforming the way USPS calculates the cost of Periodicals mail, exposing “black liquor” government subsidies to U.S. pulp mills, and battling “go paperless” greenwash.

So to save you the trouble, here are some clues we dug up about Mr. Tree from his writings:

In 2010, a postal executive startled a meeting of postal officials and mailers’ representatives by announcing that Mr. Tree was none other than Patrick R. Donahoe, then the #2 man at USPS. Five months later, Donahoe became Postmaster General. A coincidence? You decide.

A couple of months later came another clue – that Mr. Donahoe, aka Mr.Tree, had starred in those “If it fits, it ships” Postal Service commercials. But Mr. Tree soon pooh-poohed that by claiming he was actually married to a prominent publishing-industry pundit.

Confused yet? Just wait.

Only a Jew could have written this headline: Call a mohel, this baby's growing!. But the article Re-Righting The Bible: No More Namby-Pamby Peacemaking suggests a familiarity with the New Testament that only a Christian would have. And articles like Playboy and Virgin Fail to Hook Up suggest a total lack of spirituality.

An object of fantasies?

What’s clear is that he works in the magazine industry and is a self-described “print guy” (even a printing geek) and “an environmentalist who buys a lot of paper.” But he’s definitely not part of what he calls “the New York publishing elite.”

His LinkedIn profile places him in Hawaii, which should narrow things down a lot. But he claimed in an interview that the Hawaiian thing was a (lame) joke and that he actually inhabits a parallel universe.

He hangs around bookstores and doesn’t date Cosmo readers, he told us three years ago. And regarding a magazine cover of Rosie O’Donnell that has now appeared three times on Dead Tree Edition, we note Mr. Tree’s comment, “Hubba, hubba, Rosie in a bathrobe!” Perhaps a glimpse of his secret, twisted fantasies?

In early 2010 he revealed that he has a nephew – and an apparent appreciation for James Brown. An article he wrote last year for Publishing Executive magazine pays homage to The Who (See me, Sniff me, Touch me, Peel me) and Madonna. And the opening sentence of his next PubExec article ripped off “should threaten to undo us” from Martin Luther’s “A Mighty Fortress.”

Rather diverse musical tastes for one person, wouldn’t you say?

Has it ever occurred to you that Mr. Tree is confused about his own identity?

What's Weighing Down the Postal Service?

The internet and the economic downturn have not been kind to the nation's postal system, but it's also been burdened by problems that were, and are, completely avoidable.

I, and other postal commentators, have spilled a lot of ink (and pixels) explaining how billions of dollars have been needlessly taken from the U.S. Postal Service to overfund its pension and retiree health benefits. The chart above from Rafe Morrissey of the Greeting Card Association shows clearly that USPS's payments are way out of line with what's typical for government agencies.

"Both funding levels are substantial financial strains . . . and do not allow for fair competition in the marketplace," says the slide, which is taken from a free webinar that Morrissey is presenting tomorrow (Oct. 9, 2013, 2 p.m. Eastern, 8 a.m. Hawaiian) called "A commonsense solution to the postal service's budget crisis."

Morrissey, the GCA's Vice President of Postal Affairs, will present the association's plan for reviving the Postal Service, which advocates nationwide implementation of cluster boxes and adopting a host of other changes while preserving Saturday delivery and avoiding above-inflation rate increases.

For more information on the Postal Service's pension overpayments and "prefunding" of retiree health benefits, see Congress Hears the Truth About Postal Service Finances, which describes the USPS Inspector General's rather forthright Congressional testimony on the subject.

Nine Ways the Postal Service Is Not Like a Real Business

The hand wringing about the U.S. Postal Service’s broken “business model” doesn’t fool us. The “dot com” at the end of “usps.com” doesn’t fool us. The nagging of politicians and pundits who say USPS should operate more like a business doesn’t fool us.

Despite all the talk about the Postal Service being a business, regular people understand it has the soul of a government agency and in fact is not allowed to act in a businesslike manner. Here are nine examples of how USPS is not like a real business:

1. Real businesses underfund their pensions. The Postal Service overfunded its pension plan (to the benefit of the federal government, not postal employees).


2. When a too-big-to-fail business gets into financial trouble, the federal government often props it up with interest-free loans in the name of economic stimulus. When the Postal Service ran into financial trouble, Congress insisted that it continue lending interest-free money to the federal government in the guise of prepaid retiree health benefits. 


3. A real business with thousands of employees might pay its CEO $50 million a year, and no one bats an eyelash. But if the Postmaster General, who oversees 600,000-plus workers, earns 1% of that amount ($500,000), watch the politicians fall all over themselves lambasting the Postal Service’s lavish spending.


4. Real businesses are governed by a board of directors, generally consisting of about a dozen leaders who are or soon become intimately familiar with the enterprise. But the supposedly independent Postal Service in reality is governed by a 535-member board known as Congress, whose members generally know nothing about the USPS’s operations except how to get a post office named and how to prevent it from closing.


5. Board members of a real business have powerful incentives, like stock options, to make the company run more efficiently. But a member of the Postal Service’s real board (that is, a Congressman) only has incentives to preserve inefficiencies that maximize the number of postal employees and facilities in his district.


6. When the board of a real business fails to act, board members get punished with a lower stock price and the prospect of not being re-elected. When the Postal Service’s real board of directors fails to act, postal customers get punished with higher prices.


7. Real businesses make money on monopolies – at least until the trust busters come along. The Postal Service has a government-protected monopoly on the mailbox, but it comes with such onerous conditions that the monopoly is unprofitable.


8. Real businesses make campaign contributions and use lobbyists to curry favor with members of Congress. The only “campaign donation” USPS makes is the franking privilege, which enables Congress members to send free mail to constituents (usually just before election time). USPS's lobbying efforts are limited severely by law.


9. A real business that is billions in debt, has too many locations and employees, and is subject to strong union contracts would have declared Chapter 11 by now. The law would be on its side as it tried to walk away from most of its debts, scale back its operations, and even slip out of its union contracts. The Postal Service, however, apparently cannot turn to the bankruptcy courts – one more example of how the law treats it as just another government agency even though it’s supposed to operate like a business.

Do you know of other ways in which USPS is not like a business? Add a comment to this blog post or email them to me at dead.tree.edition@gmail.com. I can keep your comments anonymous if you'd like. And please see the follow-up article, 17 More Ways USPS Is Not Like a Real Business, which is based on insights from Dead Tree Edition readers.

For background information on some of the items listed above, please see:

• Overfunded pensions: Pensions: Another Government Rip-off of the Postal Service
• Prepaid retiree health benefits as interest-free loans to the federal government:Postal Relief? How About No More Congressional Thievery?
• Punishing the customers: Why the Exigent Postal Rate Increase Will Backfire
• USPS bankruptcy: Could Forever Stamps Become Worthless? What Bankruptcy Might Mean for USPS

FSS Postage Rates Will Raise Issues for Cataloguers, Publications, Printers, and USPS

Because of a provision in the recently announced postal rates, mailers and printers have four months to overhaul the way they prepare catalogs, magazines, and other flat mail.

The coming changes raise a variety of uncertainties for flats mailers, printers, and the U.S. Postal Service itself. And they will make it difficult for many mailers to project how much the new rates will cost them.

The higher rates slated to take effect January 26 will require something that until now has been optional -- and little used: Flat mail going to ZIP codes served by the Flats Sequencing System will undergo FSS preparation. That means the way the mail is sequenced, bundled, and placed on pallets will be completely different from the current methods, which will still be used for non-FSS areas – as explained in FSS Postage Pricing Will Affect Magazines, Catalogs, and Printers.

“FSS machines are a critical element in the Postal Service’s strategic operations plan,” USPS’s recent rate filing says. Currently, however, the efficiency gains that FSS machines produce are limited by the fact that most flats destinating within the ZIP Codes served by FSS machines have not been prepared to maximize FSS efficiency.”

The end of this article has an excerpt from the filing that provides an overview of why USPS is requiring FSS preparation, how the preparation of flat mail will change, and how postage rates for flats mail are being restructured. But first, here are seven questions that I have about these changes. I welcome your feedback on these, either by commenting on this blog or via email at dead.tree.edition@gmail.com.

1. How does a mailer calculate how much its postage will increase? If the exigent portion of the increase is not overturned, the increase will average 5.9% but actually be higher for some mailers and lower for others. The usual method is to take a typical mailing, plug in the new rates, and see how much that changes the bottom line. But mailers now face a whole new rate structure for a portion of their mail, with most having no clue regarding such things as how many mail pieces they will have on DFSS Scheme Pallets.
2. What is the Postal Service’s Plan B? Feeding traditional carrier-route and 5-digit bundles into an FSS machine is not ideal, but it works. The reverse, however, is not true: Mail that has undergone FSS preparation cannot easily be sorted if something goes wrong with an FSS operation, such as machine down time or too much volume.
3. How will co-mail incentives be affected? Postal officials have said they don’t want FSS rates to reduce the incentives to co-mail, which creates a win-win by lowering mailers’ postage while preparing mail in a more efficient manner for the Postal Service. But it will take analyses of many different mailing across multiple classes to determine whether that goal has been achieved. And even if it has, the characteristics of optimal co-mail pools (such as the number of mail pieces) may turn out to be quite different with FSS preparation.
4. Will some co-mail deals between printers and mailers need to be reinterpreted or renegotiated? Co-mail deals often involve a comparison of actual postage costs to baseline postage (the theoretical postage if there were no co-mail or dropshipping), with some sort of guaranteed savings or sharing of savings. But I’m already getting inquiries from some mailers indicating it’s not clear how their current contract language should be interpreted in light of the FSS rates.
5. Will FSS preparation enable printing plants to run more efficiently? Creating fewer, larger bundles will reduce the amount of packaging materials needed and in theory should enable bindery lines to run faster. But are there hidden costs as well?
6. To what extent will FSS preparation reduce mailers’ bindery costs? The way printers charge for creating mail bundles varies from printer to printer and customer to customer. In some cases, customers are charged per bundle – which should mean their bundling costs will decline significantly. In many, if not most, cases, bundling is charged on a per-thousand-copies basis, but will mailers with such deals push for per-bundle charges in the future?
7. Will all printers be able to create mailings with two very different sets of rules, one for FSS zones and one for non-FSS zones? The change should be little trouble for printing plants that specialize in publications, but will it present problems for more general commercial-printing plants that only occasionally handle flats mailings?

Here's what the Postal Service has to say about the new rate structures:

FSS machines are a critical element in the Postal Service’s strategic operations plan. FSS machines reduce the end-to-end processing costs of flat-sized mailpieces by automating their sequencing into delivery order and avoiding labor-intensive manual sortation by carriers. The Postal Service has installed FSS machines in mail processing plants that process high volumes of flat-sized mailpieces.

Currently, however, the efficiency gains that FSS machines produce are limited by the fact that most flats destinating within the ZIP Codes served by FSS machines have not been prepared to maximize FSS efficiency. For example, for mail destinating in FSS zones, carrier route preparation is of no value because it yields excessive bundles that increase bundle handling costs. In contrast, the containerization of FSS mail on FSS scheme pallets enables such mail to completely bypass bundle sortation operations and be fed directly into the FSS operations. The preparation of FSS Facility pallets also improves service by allowing the Postal Service to quickly identify FSS mail so that it can undergo necessary bundle sortation and be made available for FSS processing without delay.

Accordingly, the Postal Service is taking three steps. First, we plan to require the previously optional FSS preparation for all flat-shaped mail pieces destinating in FSS zones. Second, in this filing we are proposing FSS pricing for presorted flat-shaped pieces in Standard Mail, Outside County Periodicals, and Bound Printed Matter Flats that destinate in FSS zones. The proposed FSS prices are designed to minimize changes in postage for flats mailers. Third, in this filing we are also proposing to introduce discounts for mail on FSS scheme pallets that is entered at the location of the destinating FSS machine (DFSS).

Related articles:

• Why the Exigent Postal Rate Increase Will Backfire 
• USPS Admits FSS Is Losing Money  
• So Far, FSS Is A Step Backward, USPS Data Indicate 
• FSS Machines Running Far Slower Than Planned