Harbor Paper Delays Restart

http://kxro.wordpress.com/2013/04/11/harbor-paper-restart-delayed/

Harbor Paper will not restart full production on Monday as planned.
Owner Cesar Scolari told employees they will be postponing their start up intended for next week.
The company says that in their first 6 months of operation, as with any new enterprise, obstacles presented themselves. They told employees that as they work through the obstacles, Harbor Paper’s Board has made the decision to do a wholesale management change at the mill.
During the transition, the mill would be cutting back its operations, a move they say is temporary.
They say that they plan to restart full operations and hope that these changes will improve viability of the mill as a long term enterprise.
In a message Wednesday, the company said that they were working very hard preparing for the restart of the mill, but there are many items within the start up preparation that are currently ongoing.
A new scheduled start date was not announced.

Commerce Dept. Imposes Duty on Koehler Thermal Paper

http://www.paperage.com/2013news/04_12_2013appleton_papers_koehler.html

Appleton Papers issued a response today following a final determination by the U.S. Commerce Department that Papierfabrik August Koehler AG (Koehler) deliberately coordinated with multiple parties to structure its sales, pricing and shipping procedures in a manner that would enable it to manipulate its sales prices of lightweight thermal paper (LWTP) reported to the Department. In its final decision, the Department noted that Koehler admitted the transshipment scheme and its concealment of reportable data. 
As a result of what the Commerce Department deemed "fraudulent conduct" and a "pattern of deception" by Koehler, the Department imposed a duty of 75.36% on LWTP sold by the German-based company into the U.S., a duty the Department proposed in its preliminary determination issued in December 2012. 

Kruger's Corner Brook Gets Tax Exemption

http://www.thetelegram.com/Business/2013-04-11/article-3217845/Government-waives-6M-in-tax-for-mill/1

The Corner Brook paper mill got another financial boost from the provincial government last month, when the provincial cabinet quietly extended a tax exemption until at least 2017 worth around $6 million.

In an order in council issued by the provincial cabinet in early March, the government waived the "managed land tax" for a period of five years, from the 2012/13 budget year through to 2016/17.

2102 Trade Publishers' Revenue Up 6.2%

http://www.publishers.org/press/101/
For calendar year 2012, US Trade publishers’ net revenue grew by 6.2% as compared to calendar year 2011, according to the Association of American Publishers “StatShot” monthly report for December 2012, released today.
The report also showed increases year over year for net revenue in the Trade categories of Adult Fiction/Non-Fiction and Children’s/Young Adults. -->

Borrell Report: Paywalls Successful for Newspapers

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-04-10/gannett-times-co-web-paywalls-have-been-a-success-report-says.html
Gannett Co. (GCI), New York Times Co. (NYT) and other newspaper publishers are finding that consumers are willing to pay for online subscriptions for access to local news content, according to a report from Borrell Associates Inc.
Gannett, the owner of daily newspapers including USA Today, had 46,000 online subscriptions at the end of 2012, two-thirds of which were new readers, the Williamsburg, Virginia-based researcher said in a report being released today. Times Co. last year generated more revenue from circulation than from advertising -- in part because it “led the way” charging for online access, Borrell said.
Times Co., Gannett and others have been building these so- called paywalls in an effort to make up for lower advertising sales and print subscriptions. Still, only about 25 percent of all newspapers had done so by the first quarter.

MediaPost Mag Bag

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/197856/mag-bag-abm-siia-plan-merger.html#axzz2QHKd5Z43
Style Coalition is expanding its partnership with Hearst Digital Media through a new collaboration with Esquire, which will join forces with Style Coalition to create a men’s lifestyle vertical...
ABM, the industry association for business information and media companies, is planning a merger with the Software & Information Industry Association’s Content Division, with the goal of creating an all-encompassing trade organization equipped for the digital age and the growing range of business-to-business media models... Game Developer, the professional magazine for game makers, is closing after its June-July issue, ending a 19-year-long publishing run, according to MIN Online. And more...

IPC Media Chief Executive to Retire

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2013/apr/10/ipc-media-chief-executive-retire-sylvia-auto

Sylvia Auton to step down after 36 years with the company, in a tenure that included £1.15bn acquisition by Time Warner

Sylvia Auton, the chair and chief executive of Marie Claire publisher IPC Media, is to retire after 36 years with the company. Auton, 63, has been chief executive of the UK's largest magazine company – publisher of titles including Ideal Home, Woman's Own, InStyle and Now – since 2003.
She moved to the US to take the role of executive vice president at parent publishing company Time Inc in 2007, retaining the role of chair at IPC, but returned to the UK four years later to resume the chief executive role.

Toronto Star Tests Monthly E-Book Subscriptions

http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2013/04/toronto-star-tests-monthly-e-book-subscriptions-100.html?utm_source=MediaShift+Daily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=b4e0881afd-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIG
The Toronto Star is testing the e-book market with a dedicated subscription model. Launched in November 2012, Star Dispatches is the brainchild of the Toronto Star's marketing department. The Star already has more than 20 titles of long-form journalism to choose from -- ranging from investigations, in-depth health reporting, special reports on events and more. It's labeled as "a new perspective on a news story." E-books are produced every week for subscribers at the price of $1 each, while competing newspapers are watching to see if the model proves to be successful.

E-Book Singles Aggregator Launched

Thin Reads Launches to Track E-Book Singles Market:  A new web-based e-book singles aggregator launched this week. Called Thin Reads and started by Howard Polskin, who left his executive vice president post at the MPA in December, it's a consumer-facing database of e-book singles available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and iBookstore. E-book singles, defined as works of short fiction or non-fiction that are between 5,000 and 25,000 words long, have been a burgeoning market, one that has its fingers in magazine publishing as well. The Atlantic just formed a partnership with Longreads—and Hearst, Rodale and Condé Nast, among others, have all been selling e-books and e-singles for the last couple years.

DM News on USPS; Cost as Important as Days of Delivery

Elimination of Saturday Delivery Shelved — Price Increase Looming?:
In case you haven’t heard, the U.S. Postal Board has delayed the elimination of Saturday mail delivery slated to being August 5.
This doesn’t mean that the transition won’t happen. It just won’t happen immediately. Apparently, the board still supports the long-term elimination of Saturday mail, but it appears to be claiming that the USPS didn’t have the authority to change its own schedule and that legislation first must be passed to give it this authority.
The fallout?
Mailers don’t need to worry about adjusting their mailing schedules through summer and fall.
The USPS has expressed that, if it is not allowed to cut these $2 billion in costs by a change in schedule, heft rate increases may take it place.
In an article in DM News, there was an interesting comment from the perspective of catalogers, who apparently are very much in support of five-day mail delivery:

Our members say they’ll take one-day delivery if it translates into lower cost. That’s how much of an overarching concern cost is. — Hamilton Davison, president of the American Catalog Mailers Association

What do you think? Is the delay a relief or a concern?

LinkedIn Acquires Pulse

LinkedIn Acquires Pulse for $90 Million:  
LinkedIn, the social network for business professionals, has acquired content curation platform Pulse for $90 million, a move that edges the social network deeper into the publishing space.
Spread across 190 countries, Pulse has more than 30 million users who have activated its iOS and Android-based news reader apps. More than 750 of the world’s publishers distribute their content through Pulse, and the app spans nine languages, with 40 percent of its users coming from outside the United States.
Pulse, which launched in 2010, has given traditional magazine publishers big boosts: Between July 2011 and January 2012, Bonnier’s Popular Science went from 60,000 subscribers to more than 3 million on the platform, as initially reported by FOLIO:.

NAPL Makes Custom Research Services Available

NAPL Makes Its Proprietary Custom Research Services Available to Industry Manufacturers and Suppliers: Primary research offers industry companies invaluable insights into business leaders’ views of markets, technology, capital investment, and new business directions.
East Rutherford, N.J. ? For the first time in its 80-year history, the National Association for Printing Leadership (NAPL) is making the primary and proprietary research services of its NAPL Research Center available to the industry.