Since the 1960s, newspaper management has under-gone a transformation from essentially family-run companies to the concerns of multimedia corporations. According to Ellis Cose, author of The Press, 1963 brought the first sign that the newspaper industry was in for a change.
This category covers establishments primarily engaged in publishing periodicals or in publishing and printing periodicals. These establishments carry on the various operations necessary for issuing periodicals but may or may not perform their own printing.
This category includes establishments primarily engaged in publishing, or in publishing and printing, books and pamphlets. Establishments primarily engaged in printing or in printing and binding (but not publishing) books and pamphlets are classified in SIC 2732: Book Printing.
The earliest printing techniques were developed in China in the second century A.D. The printing industry was inaugurated in the Western world when Johannes Gutenberg, Johann Fust, and Peter Schoffer invented movable type and the printing press around the middle of the fifteenth century, producing the first printed books in the Western world with this newly developed equipment.
This classification includes establishments primarily engaged in miscellaneous publishing activities, not elsewhere classified, whether or not engaged in printing. This includes the publishing of atlases, business service newsletters, calendars, catalogs, directories, guides, maps and map globe covers, paper patterns, race track programs, racing forms, sheet music, shopping news, technical manuals and papers, telephone directories, and yearbooks, as well as the activity of micropublishing.
This category includes establishments involved primarily in printing by various processes involving lithography. It includes printers using web and flat sheet technologies.
This category includes establishments primarily engaged in commercial printing using the gravure process. Other terms often used to describe current methods of gravure production are "photogravure," "rotogravure," and "intaglio." Examples of products in this industry include magazines, postage stamps, dollar bills, calendars, fine art prints, wallpaper, catalogs, coupons, directories, newspaper advertising inserts, playing cards, postcards, gift wrap, and product packaging and wrappers.
In 2001, shipments for the other commercial printing industry totaled $3.3 billion. Nearly 35,200 people were employed in the industry in 2000; of this total, 24,234 were production workers earning an average hourly wage of $13.29.
This category covers establishments primarily engaged in designing and printing, by any process, special forms for use in the operation of a business, in single and multiple sets, including carbonized or interleaved with carbon or otherwise processed for multiple reproduction.
According to the Greeting Card Association, almost 7.0 billion cards were sold in 2001. Two manufacturers dominate this business: American Greetings Corporation, the largest publicly owned greeting card manufacturer in the world, and Hallmark Cards, Inc., the largest privately owned manufacturer.
This industry consists of establishments primarily engaged in manufacturing blankbooks, including checkbooks and books with ruling paper, and looseleaf binders. Other items included in this industry are albums, ruled chart and graph paper, and record albums.
While some feared that the Internet Age would signal a decline in bookbinders' business, no such losses had been realized by the early 2000s. The total value of bookbinding shipments jumped to more than $2.1 billion in 2000, up from $1.38 billion in 1994.
This classification includes establishments primarily engaged in typesetting for the trade, including advertising typesetting, hand or machine composition, photocomposition, phototypesetting, computer-controlled typesetting, and typographic composition.
The platemaking and related services industry was comprised primarily of companies that made printing plates used in offset lithographic printing processes. It also encompassed platemaking for numerous miscellaneous printing processes, such as gravure and letterpress.