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JUST LIKE the general public has no, or very little, understanding about the many production steps necessary in preparing, printing and finishing a printed document, I'm sure our 83,000-plus subscribers don't know what our editorial staff went through to compile the 2002 PRINTING IMPRESSIONs 400-our 19th annual listing of the largest printers in the United States and Canada ranked by annual sales.
We start the project in late summer, mailing out printed forms incorporating variable data to be updated. Some companies respond quickly, providing their previous and most recent fiscal year sales, revenues broken down by various print market segments, as well as information such as number of manufacturing sites, total of sheetfed and web offset press units, principal officers and more. After the response deadline passes, our entire editorial staff starts making follow-up calls and fax requests to the non-responders. It's a tedious, grind-it-out process where we often get caught in "voice-mail hell" or encounter snippy receptionists and secretaries who wrongly...