PI 400 -- Publications - Ad or Subtract

Knotts believes publishers and their suppliers should seize this opportunity to work more closely together to make improvements in four areas:

* Revenue creation;

* Cycle time reduction;

* Reducing costs; and

* Supply chain management and efficiency.

Barring unforeseen developments, Knotts expects the current business environment to be a relatively short-term condition. He points out that from a long-term perspective, the record advertising revenues the industry enjoyed from the second half of 1999 through most of 2000 were themselves an anomaly. "If you pull that boom-time period out of the regression, along with the current downturn, since the early 1990s the growth rate of print advertising spending has averaged somewhere between 5.5 to 6 percent," the magazine printing exec notes. "We don't see any reason why the growth rate shouldn't return to that normalcy."