Calling Publishers On the Tarpits

Folio has an interesting piece on the eroding relationship between printers and magazine publishers, as told by printing company representative. Full article is here. Some choice excerpts:

The capabilities of publisher production staff are declining.

The recession between late-2000 and mid-2002 was the first shoe, and the continuing M&A activity among publishing companies is the second. Between them, in round after round, experienced and knowledgeable production staff were among the first people sacrificed. That meant that a great deal of experience and institutional memory was lost in wave after wave.
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[P]ressure to shorten printing cycle times in order to increase the window for advertising sales (we hear that it is driven by editorial concerns less than 10 percent of the time) increased as publishers were financially strapped. So what has been the result? Less experienced, untrained or poorly-trained production people. And fewer of them. What do we, as printers, experience as a result?

The quality of incoming files is getting worse. It is the rare publisher that can manage incoming files from advertisers well and reliably distill them into PDFs. We’ve been forced to preflight every PDF file we get, and only a small percentage survive preflight intact, not requiring changes to make them run reliably.

The top executives in publishing companies tend to be removed from the consequences of structural decisions they make, and the scheduling pressure they choose to put on the printer. They don’t connect the high staff turnover with the steady flow of ad errors (and makegoods) and their regular failures to meet their scheduled dates.

Advertising-sales organizations are emerging as the ultimate decision makers within publishers.
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The pressure for makegoods has tripled—at least. Publishers are accepting ads in whatever format the advertiser chooses to send them. In one case, a monthly title of ours has us in contact with an average of 40 advertisers per issue, dealing with files that cannot be reliably translated into ink-on-paper. In the eyes of the ad-sales staff, any problem must be the responsibility of the printer.

We cannot even get publishers to improve when we hand them the resources. Production departments are so overworked and understaffed that even arranging to install a software tool we provide our clients free of charge to manage the layout of each issue, requires multiple scheduling attempts.

Adding insult to injury, nearly all publishing organizations are now badly under-capitalized.
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The saddest casualty of the changes we’ve observed over the past five years is the decline in a partnering mindset or partnering behavior between publisher and printer. We’re fast approaching the point where we’re going to have to start watching our own backs as a first priority rather than those of our publishers, which has been our practice heretofore. But embracing clients whose behavior is cavalier at best and mercenary at worst is poor business practice, and will simply pave the path to the tarpits for us.