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NEW YORK—The students of Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan fled their school and headed north in the city as the terror and destruction of September 11 unfurled only five blocks away. Through donations from printer R.R. Donnelley & Sons and paper giant Stora Enso North America, their thoughts and feelings from that day have been chronicled in a special 24-page magazine edition of the student newspaper, The Spectator. A total of 850,000 copies of the magazine were distributed in the New York Times Wednesday Education section throughout the metropolitan area. The Spectator, written and photographed entirely by students, contains articles, poetry and personal photos.

STAMFORD, CT—The long-awaited paper merger has finally become a reality. Only the participants are a bit surprising. No, Weyerhaeuser did not acquire Willamette. That should take a while. And it wasn't International Paper and Stora Enso (see Paper Mill Watch), which for now is only a rumor. How about Mead Corp. and Westvaco Corp.? On August 29 the companies jointly announced a $3 billion merger, with a combined annual revenues total of $8 billion. The newly created company will be called MeadWestvaco Corp. and will be headquartered here. The move essentially launches MeadWestvaco from mid-sized player into worldwide competition with IP and Georgia-Pacific.

STAMFORD, CT—While a report in an August edition of the Swedish business daily Dagens Industri indicated that International Paper and Stora Enso were in merger talks that would create the largest worldwide paper concern at $40 billion, it seemed unlikely to happen any time soon. Citing unnamed sources, Dagens Industri reported that talks have been ongoing for the past year. Both IP, based here, and Stora Enso, with headquarters in Helsinki, Finland, and Stockholm, Sweden, refused to comment on the report, calling it a market rumor. A merger between the two paper giants is an attractive concept. IP is the worldwide leader in terms of sales

BY ERIK CAGLE After two years of eye-bulging, wallet-emptying consolidations sweeping through the commercial printing industry, it is not all that surprising to hear forecasts that the consolidation craze has peaked and is now on the downturn. It may even be true (reserve judgment after reading the related article on page 88). The consolidation front was, in fact, comparatively quiet in 2000, and it shared the news pages with bigger developments. Commercial printing stocks didn’t fare so well in 2000, which explains the lack of consolidation to a degree. A number of public companies bought back large chunks of their stock in the face of falling

NEW YORK—It took two years for consolidation to transform the commercial printing sector, it has taken two months of consolidation to transform the printing equipment supplier sector, and in a remarkably swift series of moves, it has taken scarcely two weeks for consolidation to transform the paper market. In mid-February, the low share prices of paper companies, as well as the usual quest to expand markets and raw material sources, drove a series of mergers and acquisitions in the paper and forest products industry—moves that will have a broad impact on commercial printers, for whom paper products are a primary cost center. Among the recent moves:

Foreign paper and board producers gobble up U.S. industry giants as the market continues to tighten for commercial printers. BY ERIK CAGLE Typically, activity in the paper industry is about as gripping as a documentary on fast-drying paints. But during a two-week period in February, two of the biggest names in U.S. paper and board manufacturing paired off with large, foreign counterparts in one of the biggest consolidation waves in industry history. When the smoke cleared: UPM-Kymmene, of Finland, purchased Stamford, CT-based Champion International. Finnish-Swedish manufacturer Stora Enso acquired Chicago-based Consolidated Papers, less than a month after buying Norweigan paper wholesaler Carl Emil