United States Postal Service

A former United States Postal Service employee has been sentenced to six months in prison followed by six months of house arrest for destroying, hiding and delaying the delivery of at least 44,900 pieces of mail.

U.S. Chief Judge Joseph H. McKinley also ordered 34-year-old William "Brent" Morse of Dawson Springs, KY, to pay $14,808.01 for losses suffered by residents, a local bank and two businesses which attempted to mail commercial circulars.

Morse, who was a postal worker for five years, admitted that between March 2011 and March 30, 2013, he destroyed at least 1,000 pieces of mail

Although Wall Street mostly yawned when Quad/Graphics announced this week it is acquiring Brown Printing, the pending transaction is a big deal for many major publishers. And it provides some interesting insights into the U.S. printing and publishing industries and even into the U.S. Postal Service.

Rather than trying to squeeze more years out of ancient equipment, as some Worldcolor plants used to do, Brown kept pace with Quad and RR Donnelley when it came to investing in new presses and bindery lines. But it wasn’t enough.

Lowen Color Graphics of Hutchinson, KS, is producing and installing vehicle graphics on USPS trucks in major urban centers. Each driver side vehicle graphic features a dynamic image of Spider-Man with corresponding vehicle markings.

In his keynote to the National Postal Forum, Patrick R. Donahoe, Postmaster General and CEO of the Postal Service, described a changing attitude of marketers toward the role of direct mail as a means of attracting and retaining customers.

Because the Flats Sequencing System is not performing as anticipated, a mailers coalition is urging the Postal Service to rethink how it handles catalogs, magazines, and other flat mail.

More than one-third of the mail intended for Flats Sequencing System (FSS) is actually bypassing the machines, which are also experiencing a reject rate of up to 10 percent, the coalition noted in an “Industry Memo” last week to USPS officials.

USPS and industry together should revisit some of the most basic assumptions about flat mail, the memo from four major industry groups said.

In Washington, DC, May 6-7, 2014, members of NPES, Printing Industries of America, and key supporting associations will convene for Print's Voice '14 where they will bring graphic communications industry business concerns directly to their elected representatives and other congressional leaders.

Quad/Graphics Inc. is opening a new commingling center in Westampton, NJ. The new center—a five-minute drive from the existing direct mail production facility—will start up in April 2014 and is expected to be fully operational in the third quarter. Quad's East Coast commingling center is complemented by a Midwest commingling center in New Berlin, WI, just west of Milwaukee.

The mailing and printing industries suffered a hard loss in early February when the Senate committee on homeland security and government affairs voted 9-1 to advance the Postal Reform Act of 2013 to the Senate floor. A last-minute amendment from Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) to maintain the current pricing structure was soundly rejected by the committee.

Victoria (Vicki) Kennedy, widow of the late Senator Ted Kennedy, was nominated by President Obama on Wednesday for a seat on the U.S. Postal Services (USPS) board of Governors.

Some people might regard the fact that Obama has nominated Vicky Kennedy as some form of political reward. On the other hand, those types of payoff usually come in the form of plum ambassadorships—not the postal board.

The bill that emerged on Thursday has an amendment forbidding the USPS from moving to five-day delivery until the fourth quarter of 2017. That happens to be the precise time when the USPS predicts volume will actually tumble to 140 billion level.

In other words, defenders of Saturday delivery concede that mail volume is likely to dramatically diminish. They are trying to throw a further road block in front of the USPS, even though the postal service insists that carrying letters six days a week is no longer cost-effective.

It’s important to look at the Senate’s head-scratcher of a decision in a