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NPPAers...Probably more than you want to know...

With more than 9,000 members and subscribers on the News Photographer
mailing list, there are probably quite a few who fail to receive their
copies in a timely fashion for who-knows-how-many reasons -- mangled in the
mails, covers with labels torn off, failure to notify the national office
with address changes, difficulty of the editor in keeping up and staying on
deadline, whatever...

The April issue, polybagged with the 1999 Directory, indeed was mailed
Friday 4/30. The magazines, bagged and sorted by barcode, were loaded by
the printer in Fostoria, Ohio, into the semi-trailer of a USPS contract
hauler for delivery to the postal service Bulk Mail Center in Detroit,
Mich. Incidentally, the magazine is mailed at the "periodicals" rate, which
is the new term for second class.

I figure that it takes two weeks or longer for an issue to travel from East
Coast to West Coast. My own member copy of the March issue took a week to
arrive and I live only 23 miles from the printer. Oddly, an NPPAer in
Columbia, Mo., today (5/6)received his polybagged April issue and
Directory. He's 400 miles away from Fostoria, Ohio, the point of entry into
the mails.  I've yet to receive my member copy.

Anothert quirk...names and addresses for the magazine mailing labels are
spooled off the NPPA database in Durham onto a floppy disk. The disk is
sent to the printer in Fostoria, where it is inserted into the Gray
Printing Co. mailroom computer to generate the labels with barcodes. While
reading the NPPA disk, the computer compares those addresses from the NPPA
database with a master CD with USPS information and make what it thinks are
corrections on the printed labels while looking up the barcode for a
particular street address.  The CD, prepared by one of several commercial
firms, contains change-of-address information based on change-of-address
forms filled out by subscribers and given to their local post offices. All
major printers/periodicals subscribe to one of these CD services. When the
CD is messed up, it may change a correct NPPA address to an incorrect one,
as was the case today wlith the Columbia, Mo., member (that's why he
called). We're going to try to straighten that one out.

When the April material arrives, please check your address label as well as
your Alphabetical listing in the 1999 Directory. If there's a problem,
please notify the national office at nppa@mindspring.com. The Alpha listing
includes your mailing address, employer or affiliation, your choice of home
or work telephone number, E-mail address if you gave it to the national
office, and the date on which began your continuous membership in the NPPA
(like my American Express card, which says "member since 72," which is
where I got the idea; my NPPA join date is Jan. 10, 1967).

NPPA Executive Director Bradley Wilson is in the process of converting the
NPPA database in Durham to a more user-friendly system in the coming months
(FileMaker Pro). Now is a good time to make sure your membership
information is accurate.  In this conversion process, instead of
re-keyboarding 10,000 names (currently in all capital letters) into the new
database, a software program wil automatically (in most cases) figure out
where the capital letters should be--like the first letter of the word in
each person's name. Not foolproof, Bradley Wilson says, but better than
re-keyboarding. Anyhow, check your labels from time to time and notify the
national office of changes.


Thanks for listening. And regards, jim g

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Jim Gordon, Editor  (419) 352-8175   FAX (419) 354-5435
News Photographer magazine
Nat'l Press Photographers Assn.
1446 Conneaut Avenue
Bowling Green, OH 43402

Professor emeritus of journalism
Bowling Green (Ohio) State University

jrgordon@dacor.net
www.nppa.org
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