AAP November 2023 StatShot Report: Overall Publishing Industry Down 0.5% for Month of November, and Up 0.6% Year-To-Date

The United States Postal Service (Postal Service) and United States Postal Inspection Service (Postal Inspection Service) today announced expanded actions to protect Postal employees and the security of the nation’s mail and packages as threats and attacks on letter carriers and mail fraud incidents have escalated concurrently with a national rise in crime. The Postal Service and Postal Inspection Service held a joint briefing for Congress members and staff on these efforts on May 11, 2023. “As crime rises, so do the threats against our public servants,” said Postmaster General and Chief Executive Officer Louis DeJoy. “The men and women of the Postal Service are walking our nation’s streets every day to fulfil our mission of delivering mail and packages to the American people. Every Postal employee deserves to work in safety and to be free from targeting by criminals seeking to access the public's mail.”

First quarter-to-date service performance scores covering the period Oct. 1 through Dec. 10 included: *First-Class Mail: 90.6 percent of First-Class Mail delivered on time against the USPS service standard, an improvement of 2.1 percentage points from the fourth quarter. *Marketing Mail: 92.1 percent of Marketing Mail delivered on time against the USPS service standard, consistent with performance from the fourth quarter. *Periodicals: 82.0 percent of Periodicals delivered on time against the USPS service standard, a slight decrease of .74 percent compared to performance from the fourth quarter. Overall, average days to deliver a mailpiece across the network was 2.7 days.

Here’s a headline for you: Print is alive and well with consumers everywhere. I know it’s different than the headlines you’ve been seeing lately, but it happens to be a fact. True, the magazine media industry is in a transitional moment, but a few select stats can easily paint a picture that doesn’t reflect the state of our industry. At Hearst, we value our core print business, and readers do as well. The most recent report for the first half of 2017 shows that, for the industry as a whole, print circulation is consistent, and, at Hearst, it was even slightly up. What’s more, more than half of our portfolio has seen audience growth, which is especially impressive considering that many of our brands have increased the cost of their subscriptions. Magazines have successfully extended across digital platforms, and all expressions of our brands are consistent or improving in terms of audience numbers. For example, Good Housekeeping’s circulation is 4.3 million, where it has been for many years. At the same time, the brand has seen an increase in its overall audience, with robust traffic online and millions of social media followers across platforms. All boats are lifted. Print enhances digital and vice versa. Click Read More below for more of the story.