The new rates were not only developed with no public or congressional input/oversight ...

Thursday, May 17, 2007 by The Huffington Post | Going Postal on Rate Hikes for Independent Periodicals | by Andi Zeisler
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Which is where the conspiracy-theory stuff comes in. The new rates were not only developed with no public or congressional input/oversight, they weren’t even developed by the Postal Service itself. Rather, the plan was brewed up by an entity that happens to have a pretty hefty stake in maintaining its own primacy in the magazine realm: Time Warner publications, publisher of such checkout-counter heavies as People, Fortune, Sports Illustrated, InStyle, and Sunset. The announcement was made only weeks ago, and the short notice hasn’t allowed the small publications at risk time to do much more than mutter obscenities in the USPS’s general direction.

As the largest magazine publisher in the U.S., Time Warner shouldn’t need to look over its shoulder at the likes of a comparatively tiny operation like The Nation; nevertheless, the policy it proposed seems like a paranoid guarantee that it never has to. Many small magazines simply won’t be able to afford to continue publishing if their mailing rates increase 30 percent; fewer new magazines will be able to launch without a sizable amount of start-up capital and/or corporate backing. And what that means is that we’ll see a dwindling number of magazines devoted to independent, noncommercial discourse –whether that discourse is from the left or the right, about hunting or about pressing your own tofu. ...