|
2011 GPA
NEWSPAPER
DIRECTORY
ABOUT | CONTACT
CONFERENCES & EVENTS
CONTESTS
EDUCATION
JOB BANK
MEMBER NEWS
MEMBERSHIP
PUBLIC NOTICES
SCHOLARSHIP & INTERNSHIPS
|
Postal service puts Saturday delivery on the chopping block
NNA fighting proposal, Congress has final say
From staff reports
Arguing against a plan to cut mail delivery service from six days to five, the president of the National Newspaper Association said that by dropping Saturday mail delivery, the U.S. Postal Service would be "walking away from its core business."
Cheryl Kaechele, publisher of the Allegan County News in Michigan, is among those leading NNA's effort to keep the postal service from ending Saturday service. "Basic six-day mail delivery is the Postal Service's franchise," she said. "It takes a dangerous step in the wrong direction if it walks away from its core business."
Facing massive billion-dollar annual losses, the postal service is considering the step to staunch the bleeding. In the first half of its current fiscal year, the postal service reported a loss of $1.9 billion. It projects its total loss for the year, which ends Sept. 30, at $7 billion. Last fiscal year, it lost $3.8 billion.
Cutting Saturday mail delivery would save $3.1 billion a year, it estimates. The cut would include the elimination of street delivery of mail on Saturdays, the elimination of mail pickups and no weekend processing of mail in plants, except for Express Mail and some advertising mail.
Before any such radical cut can be implemented, the Postal Regulatory Commission will have to issue an advisory opinion on the plan, and then Congress will make a final decision.
On June 21 in Chicago, the regulatory commission conducted one of seven field hearings on the proposal.
Kaechele supported fellow Michigan publisher Christopher Huckle, who testified at the hearing that ending Saturday service would interfere with delivery of his family-owned six-day daily newspaper's largest issue of the week. The Cadillac News would suffer either a major revenue loss or be forced to hire carriers to deliver the paper, something it is ill equipped to manage or afford.
"Since our company has not had a private delivery infrastructure since 1980, the framework for creating such a service is not present in the company," Huckle said. "We are not part of a corporate chain that can tap into expertise at a headquarters, or borrow experts from elsewhere in the corporation to show us how to create such a service. Such an undertaking will drain resources of our senior management and myself at a time when the tight economy demands our attention to the economic health of the community and the tending of our own customers. And then, even if we are able to execute this feat, we are not permitted to deliver our newspapers in the mailbox, where our readers are accustomed to finding it."
Huckle urged the commission not to recommend the elimination of Saturday mail. Instead, he believes the Postal Service should focus on cost cutting. Help from Congress in trimming contributions to prepaid retiree health care is one part of the solution.
Another part is to look at cost cutting inside the postal service. "The perception is that the postal service is choosing the path of least resistance by cutting service rather than tackling internal cost controls, including labor pay rates, as private-sector businesses have had to do during this bad economy," Huckle said.
"We share the concerns of the Postal Service about the effects of the recession and Internet competition," Kaechele added later. "The newspaper business is fighting in that same trench. But while we are looking for every non-essential cost to trim, we are continuing to cover the core news stories. That is our franchise. Basic six-day mail delivery is the Postal Service's franchise. It takes a dangerous step in the wrong direction if it walks away from its core business."
NNA Postal Committee Chairman Max Heath, of Shelbyville, Ky., said NNA was committed to continuing to work toward better solutions for the Postal Service's financial challenges than major cuts in service.
"Our newspapers have changed their mailing practices dramatically over the years to help the Postal Service deal with its rising costs. A newspaper like the Cadillac News basically handles every piece of mail processing before dropping the mail at a delivery office for the postal carriers' distribution," Heath said. "There isn't much more we can do to help in mail improvement than that. But we can help Congress to recognize that cost-control solutions can and must be found."
- National Newspaper Association contributed to this story.
|
|
LENDING LIBRARY