Harris DeWese

For printing salespeople toiling for a business that offers both digital and offset printing, the natural motivation is to sell a $30,000 web job as opposed to a $1,500 digital job.

PHILADELPHIA—Printing Impressions magazine and Compass Capital Partners, a leading M&A and management consulting firm, have created a free M&A listing service for printers who are looking to either sell their business or acquire firms. The service, which debuts in the October issue of PI, features anonymous, brief descriptions about the buyer or seller.

I INVENTED the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme and announced the idea right here in Printing Impressions in 2001. You can look it up. None of you went for my idea. Madoff must have read that column and stole my idea, just like he stole all that money from his fund’s investors.

SINCE WE do not cover international printing events, the following item did not appear on our news pages this month. But we seem to have hit another patch of fatal, machinery-related incidents. The most recent accident happened in Australia, where an 18-year-old man was dragged head-first into a box printing machine in mid-February. It took 45 minutes to extricate the worker, who died later that day at a hospital.

BLAME IT on the around-the-clock cable news channels, the endless talking heads appearing on financial talk shows, and negative articles in daily newspapers and on popular Websites, which seem to post one doom-and-gloom story after another. Industry publications, including Printing Impressions, can also be taken to task for playing up news of plant closures and head count reductions—even though PI’s printing company profiles (check out this month’s cover story) and columns highlight successful companies and provide sound business advice.

MANY, MANY years ago, when we had no chores, when we weren’t in church, or when we weren’t building barrels or making wagon wheels, we would play tic tac toe or connect the dots by the light of the one bulb in our ceiling.

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