As Americans find themselves nickeled and dimed about everything from gas to food and housing, it's important to notice that the fee creep is extending to vital forms of reading matter. It may be getting easier and cheaper to hear about Britney's custody battles, but it will become more expensive to read in depth about health care finance or our corporations' destabilization of foreign governments.
Last summer, in an underpublicized series of moves, postal rates were raised for small-circulation periodicals because Time Warner, which publishes Time, Fortune, Sports Illustrated, People and other mass market magazines, got the Postal Regulatory Commission to adopt its, Time Warner's own plan for a rate hike.
The Post Office had planned to institute an 11.7 percent increase for all periodicals, and, together with the PRC, had earlier rejected Time Warner's request to load the hike in favor of magazines with high-volume circulations like its own products. But Time Warner eventually got the PRC to accept its plan, which resulted in 20 to 30 percent hikes for smaller publications and 10 percent rises for the larger ones, according to research by McGraw-Hill.
Staff at the The Nation estimated that the rate hike will cost the liberal journal an extra half a million dollars a year, enough to put some small publications out of business. But the issue is not whether the affected periodicals are liberal or conservative, religious or secular; the increase will hit them all. The scandal is that the PRC let a corporation write the rules for the rate hike. Newspapers and magazines have been given discounted postal rates since 1794 because the Founding Fathers considered them essential.
At the same time periodicals were struggling to deal with the postal rate increase, which would force some to consider raising subscription prices, another development was contributing to the expense of publishing news of broad interest to readers of all income levels: some towns—Northampton was one—were discovering that they could charge fees for the use of honor boxes on their sidewalks by newspapers, including the Advocate. As of January 1, the Advocate and other newspapers will pay a fee of $25 per year for each box, which for this newspaper will amount to $625 or more. While $625 is hardly a crushing addition to a paper's annual operating costs, what's to guarantee that more of the 40-plus towns in our circulation area won't charge fees in the future?
And in some parts of the country another tradition is in danger as public libraries in strapped communities become privatized. There are grounds for worry that for-profit companies will throw out slow-circulating but valuable older works and fill the stacks with fly-off-the-shelves romance novels or other commercially attractive fluff; charge for previously free services; or sell patron information to other businesses.
It's dangerous to let the costs of information dissemination creep up, and it's against American tradition. For information to become a commodity available only to the elite is even worse for a democracy than the income gap.
