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In late September, a man walked into the office of Jill Friesz, the owner of a newspaper publishing company in North Dakota, in a rage. “He was telling me he was tired of my excuses and that he may as well just quit subscribing to the paper,” said Friesz, whose company, GS Publishing, operates seven weekly newspapers across the southwestern part of the state.

Friesz was surprised by all the “swearing and hollering,” but not the emotion: like many subscribers, the visitor was upset because his paper never seemed to show up on time. “I have so many frustrated people that call and just say, ‘Well, there’s no point in me getting the newspaper because it never gets delivered to me,’” Friesz said.

The problem, according to Friesz and a half dozen other newspaper publishers, editors, and trade association members who spoke to CJR, is significant delays by the US Postal Service, leading to weekly papers arriving at the homes of subscribers as late as nine weeks. Weekly papers have struggled with postal delays for years, but publishers say that recently it has gotten notably worse. In 2014, periodicals were scheduled to be delivered within three days, according to a GAO report, which found that up to a quarter of them were delivered late. This delivery range for periodicals was later increased to up to nine days, and in 2021, a new cost-cutting initiative called “Delivering for America” resulted in the closure of distribution centers across the country, exacerbating the problem.

In April, Heather Holmes, the general manager of the biweekly Lakeland Times in Minocqua, Wisconsin, grew so fed up with the delays her subscribers were experiencing that she put AirTags in several newspapers being shipped out of state. (She did this with both the approval of the subscribers the papers were going to and officials at her local post office, who were eager to better understand why these papers were being held up.) One of the tagged papers, destined for the village of Glendale Heights, in Illinois, took eighteen days to arrive, with stops at distribution centers in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and four other locations in Illinois. “I’m losing hundreds and hundreds of subscriptions of these people that just want to read the Lakeland Times because this is their hometown, or they have family here, and they’re not getting it for two or three weeks,” said Holmes.

Charles O’Neill, the publisher of the weekly paper Harbor Light News, in Harbor Springs, Michigan, received so many complaints from out-of-state subscribers in the month of September—some of whom said their editions had taken more than two months to arrive—that he wrote an article addressing the problem, and urging them to contact their local post offices and representatives to complain. He also reported his concerns to the Michigan Press Association and the National Newspaper Association, which are collecting reports of these delays. “Is this the ultimate decline of the post office?” O’Neill said. “I don’t know, but it impacts us.”

Most of the delays have involved newspapers sent to subscribers in other states, but some local deliveries have also been affected. Eric Hamp, the publisher and editor of the Houghton Lake Resorter and the Crawford County Avalanche, in northern Michigan, said that some in-state subscribers recently told him that they received the August 7, 14, and 21 editions of their papers on October 3. “We have a printing press in-house, and furthermore I still tie all the papers and put them in mailing tubs, so I know they’re going out the door,” said Hamp, who received over sixty complaints from readers about delays in September. He also published an editorial asking readers to call their local congressmen.

Cecile Wehrman, the executive director of the North Dakota Newspaper Association, said that the sixty or so weekly newspapers in her state are the only source of news for many residents. “There’s no radio station, there’s no television station covering that community. It’s only the local newspaper,” she said. “So when you curtail the delivery of the local newspaper, you’re impacting that entire sixty- or seventy-five-mile-square radius of people who are depending on information about what their local government is doing.” 

The delays also threaten the revenue of small newspapers that rely heavily on their subscribers, which often operate on razor-thin margins. “I’ve been getting people saying, ‘If I can’t get my paper, I’m not going to renew,’” said Autumn Hill, the publisher of the Iron County Miner in Hurley, Wisconsin, who keeps a complaint log of every call she receives. “So I’m sure we definitely have lost subscribers because of this. Some don’t care, whether it’s us or the post office. They’re just not getting what they paid for.” Some publishers have urged out-of-town readers to switch to digital subscriptions, but many say they prefer the traditional paper; some of the papers don’t offer digital subscriptions.

Advertising revenue has also taken a hit. Earlier this year, one of Friesz’s papers in North Dakota had to refund dozens of special New Year’s advertisements after the paper didn’t show up for four weeks. Another paper recently had to refund an advertiser after their promotion for a rummage sale didn’t reach readers until after the sale was over, she said. “When this happens, the newspapers rarely can get an answer as to why the papers are hung up, and they never get a refund for late delivery,” said Wehrman. “And so that is incredibly frustrating and causing some real economic hardships for our weekly newspapers.”

Cathy Koeppen Purcell, a spokesperson for USPS, said the service is aware of the “delivery issues” facing publishers and is working to make improvements. “The US Postal Service has a close working relationship with the newspaper industry and meets frequently with newspaper organization representatives,” she said. Purcell pointed to a two-year-old program designed to improve delivery times for newspapers with twenty-five thousand subscribers or fewer.

Most of the publishers who spoke with CJR said they have found their local postal workers to be communicative and well-intentioned, despite cutbacks to personnel and resources. They point the finger at officials at USPS at the national level, whom they describe as aloof and hard to reach. In August 2024, Senator John Hoeven of North Dakota organized a postal roundtable; attendees were given the phone number of a customer service representative in Minnesota to call if a paper goes missing, Wehrman said. “We’ve had to access that a half a dozen times. And it’s funny, we never really get an answer as to what happened.” The complaints sometimes lead to temporarily improved service, she added.

“We’re customers of the United States Postal Service,” said Hill. “I write out checks and take them to the post office about every three weeks, and we want to get the service that we are paying for. That’s all we want.”

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