Media

Magazine industry chief rails against USPS

Mary Berner, the grenade-tossing CEO of the MPA the Association of Magazine Media, tossed one at the US Postal Service at the opening of the American Magazine Media Conference in New York on Tuesday.

“I’m not pissed anymore about where we are and where we are headed as an industry,” she said. “I still get aggravated by the inability of lawmakers to fix the US Postal Service as opposed to making us and other mailers subsidize its refusal to make the hard choices that every other business in this country has made.”

The magazine industry is bracing for an emergency, or “exigent,” rate hike as the cash-strapped USPS scrambles to raise prices to offset falling mail volume.

“I mean, who thinks raising rates on its best customers is a remotely sane idea for a business whose revenue is already in free fall?” Berner said.

“It’s like raising prices on shoe laces when everyone is using Velcro. How about incentivizing us to mail more instead of ensuring that we will mail less?”

While the post office was at the top of her hit list, Berner didn’t stop there in a wide-ranging rant.

“The security desk in MPA’s building lobby never fails to piss me off when they bust me for not having my ID (you’d think that we work at CIA headquarters),” she said.

Berner said when one looks at all the platforms that magazines are presented on, “consumers are decidedly not abandoning magazines.

“The fact is magazine media audiences have been growing steadily, with the combined print/tablet audience up nearly 3 percent year over year and tablet audiences alone growing 84 percent over the same period.”

The executive said on the iTunes Apple store, the top 15 grossing lifestyle apps belong to magazines and 44 or the top 50 lifestyle apps are also magazine related.

“We have an engaged and growing audience, the most coveted fundamental of them all.”