These are uncertain times in the newspaper business.
The number of newspapers has been dropping nationwide – that trend hasn’t affected community papers like the Bay City Sentinel.
But we once again realized last week that we could be hurt by something close by and on which we rely – the U.S. Post Office.
Last week, an assistant post office supervisor made the decision against putting the Sentinel papers into the mail Wednesday.
We deliver most of our papers to the post office on Wednesdays.
The rest go on racks throughout the county.
We sort the mail – it’s no longer done here anyway – and we pay extra to put the copies into envelopes - as another labor-saving step for the post office to ensure delivery of our paper on Thursday.
But that wasn’t done and the papers reached our mail readers a day late, on Fridays.
Our readers expect to get the papers Thursday.
They pay for it to reach them then and many are understandably unhappy when the paper isn’t there.
The reasons for not doing their job for us were many.
Whatever the reason, they didn’t bother to call and let us know the paper hadn’t been touched Wednesday.
Instead, we learned from mail carriers that the paper wasn’t there for them to deliver.
After seven going on eight years of mailing out the Sentinel, the carriers know the Sentinel’s familiar envelope.
At one point, they were apparently told we were a few cents short of the bill, even though we maintain an account which is supposed to cover under payments.
But here’s the deal.
This isn’t the first time this has happened.
We’ve gone through this before, which makes last week’s incompetence that much more frustrating.
The post office has many such frustrations to address, but that’s not our problem.
A newspaper than can’t deliver its editions reliably will have a hard time staying afloat if readers fall off.
All businesses have challenges, yet you don’t expect a service that you pay extra for to decide to take a day off on your job on your nickel.
