By Carol Stiffler
At 8 o’clock every Wednesday morning, we bring hundreds of copies of the latest Newberry News right to the Newberry post office. The papers are addressed, labeled, and sorted – ready to begin their treks to subscribers near and far. They leave Newberry that same day.
We’ve never missed that deadline. In our six years of ownership, we’ve had plenty of chaotic production days. Illnesses, crashing servers, Internet issues, and/or major last-minute revisions add stress to every deadline – but we make it. Our paper prints Tuesday night and gets delivered to our newsroom late that night. A few bleary hours later, it’s out of our hands and into those of our national postal system.
Workers at the Newberry post office quickly and unfailingly send the Newberry News on its way to readers. After our papers leave Newberry, what happens next is not easily explained or defended.
As a periodical, the News is relegated to what used to be called second-class mail service. Now it’s known as “Periodical Class Service”. That’s a fancier name, but here’s the ugly truth: Periodical Class Service can be grossly inefficient.
“The United States Postal Service does NOT guarantee delivery of Periodicals within a specified time,” reads an answer in the frequently asked questions online at USPS.com.
The USPS reserves the right to hold periodicals – newspapers, magazines, etc. – at any sorting hub they pass through, for any amount of time. While postage rates increase at a frantic pace – seven times since 2020 – service has declined. The USPS is strapped for cash, as we know, and has intentionally degraded their own service to cut costs. Less mail travels by air these days, for example. Smaller sorting houses have been consolidated so mail now travels to larger regional hubs – taking longer to arrive.
At every stop, your newspaper may sit and gather dust until that facility finally ships it onward.
In late August, one subscriber called to tell us their June 30 issue had just arrived.
Some readers say they sometimes get three issues on the same day. Or that a new issue somehow hurtled ahead and beat prior editions to the mailbox.
Some readers are sure we must not have mailed their paper, or ask us to go to the Newberry office to locate their Missouri-bound newspaper. But we did mail the newspaper, and it’s long gone – truly out of our hands.
We agonize over these postal issues, which are painful for us, our readers, and our advertisers.
We earnestly want our work to reach our readers. We’re grateful for every person or business that supports the Newberry News. We’re proud of our work and we want to share it with you. We often mail missed copies in first-class envelopes, paying quadruple what we already paid to mail that issue the first time.
Board members of the Michigan Press Association met via Zoom with U.S. Rep Jack Bergman on Monday to share their postal service concerns. From newsrooms across the state, board members told the same story: Newspapers are suffering in the hands of the USPS.
Bergman listened, took notes, and asked questions. Is this happening around the country? Yes, he was told. He thanked us for sharing the information. We felt a little hope.
Much has changed in the USPS in recent years, but here’s what their mission still reads:
The Postal Service shall have as its basic function the obligation to provide postal services to bind the Nation together through the personal, educational, literary, and business of the people. It shall provide prompt, reliable, and efficient services to patrons in all areas and shall render postal services to all communities.
Prompt, reliable, and efficient.
We could subscribe to that.
