The Green Pages
April 15, 2008
For publisher Dawn Codd, making direct mail magazines more eco-friendly is the right thing to do for the planet and for her business
Dawn Codd firmly believes that her three direct mail lifestyle magazines all stuffed with special offers, restaurant reviews and events listings bring plenty of value to the 97,000 readers in the upscale communities that the magazines target.
But the Washington, D.C.-based publisher also knows that, in an era of ever-increasing ecological awareness, some recipients may view direct mail publications as a waste of precious natural resources. For that reason and because she and her partners personally support environmental causes Codd wanted to reduce both that perception and the size of her company’s “footprint” on the earth. “Our beliefs are why we did what we did,” she says.
What they did was adopt an aggressively conservation-oriented approach to producing the trio of publications: City Living Source (citylivingsource.com), for households in D.C.; City Living Source-Baltimore (citylivingbaltimore.com), for similarly well-heeled readers in that city; and Howard County Living (howardliving.com), for residents of an affluent suburban area in central Maryland. (Each publication goes to about 32,000 readers six times a year.)
Beginning with their January 2008 issues, all three magazines have become significantly more eco-friendly. That’s a change that involves more than simply adding green content although there’s more of that these days, too. Codd has focused on producing the magazines as cleanly and greenly as possible. “Everything about our business is about recycling and sustainability,” she says.
Specifically, the publications are printed only on Forest Stewardship Council-certified paper, meaning that it’s from timber grown and harvested according to the international forest-management association’s strict environmental standards. In addition, Codd recently switched to a new printer that uses soy-based ink, an alcohol-free press operation and a filmless, all-digital printing process that eliminates the need for silver and chemicals. “That’s all more healthful for readers and for the environment,” says Codd, who has promoted the printer’s techniques in print and online.
But what she hasn’t publicly emphasized is what those changes are costing her young business: an additional $1,000 per issue for each magazine. That’s an expense that she’s not passing on to advertisers until next year: “[Going green] was so important because of our personal beliefs that we were going to do it no matter what,” she says. “Our advertising rates will go up as our circulation goes up. And our circulation is growing pretty fast.”
