“Terribly frustrating”: After USPS changes, more newspapers aren’t reaching subscribers on time

Many publishers first noticed the complaints spike last summer.

The subscriber whose weekly newspaper arrived five days late. The subscriber who received no issues for three weeks in a row, then three issues on the same day a month later. The subscriber not receiving newspapers at all.

These are examples of the frustrations local publishers in Maine, Michigan, South Dakota, and Virginia told me they’re hearing from subscribers and peer publishers. They, like many community publishers, rely on the United States Postal Service for timely delivery. The issues they’re seeing are representative of delays stymieing publishers across the country — subscribers have reported delays as long as two months, Columbia Journalism Review reported in October.

Especially for weekly publishers in smaller, rural markets, USPS delivery has long been the cheaper, lower-lift alternative to the carriers many metro dailies still pay to perform the classic morning ritual of tossing newspapers onto porches and lawns. Some newspapers have been delivered by mail for decades, some for centuries, and some have only switched from carrier to USPS in the last few years, looking to cut costs at the margins, reduce print days, and sidestep the challenges (and management headaches) of the changing carrier labor market.

USPS delivery may save most rural publishers money compared to carriers, but it isn’t cheap. The Postal Service — a system as old as the country — is losing billions of dollars per year, and as part of its efforts to break even, it has significantly hiked its rates. President Trump has insulted the system and mused about privatization, though the current postmaster has committed to preserving the agency’s independence. (Postal service challenges are not unique to the U.S.: The Danish postal service stopped delivering letters last year in the face of “increasing digitalization,” and newspapers are carrier-delivered.)

Other recent USPS cuts and policy changes have contributed to more publishers seeing widespread, sometimes extreme delivery delays. By the USPS’ own measurement, about 20% of periodicals were delivered late nationally between July 1 and Sept. 30, 2025, up from around 15% delivered late during the same period in 2024. And that’s true even as the USPS has changed the goalposts on its own service standards over the years; while geographic and other caveats mean those service standards vary, the general in-state service standard for periodical delivery is 3-6 days within the contiguous U.S. (The USPS website also states it “does NOT guarantee delivery of Periodicals within a specified time.”)

In Maine, the Midcoast Villager is among the newspapers struggling with those delays. The USPS is “a service, and not a business that has historically had or needs a profit motive,” editor-in-chief Willy Blackmore wrote in an editorial last November. “But it is a service that the Villager spends over $49,000 on annually, and we decidedly are not getting what we pay for.”

Recent USPS service problems aren’t exclusive to newspapers. But for a business where timeliness is baked into the value proposition, they can be uniquely damaging, leading subscribers to cancel and even, in some cases, threatening advertising revenue. Small local publishers can’t afford those losses, and they have little visibility into — or control over — the delays hurting their bottom lines.

“We’re fighting against something that we really have no control over”

The Midcoast Villager, created when four publications merged in 2024, prints weekly. It’s the primary or only local news source for most of the 80,000 residents of Maine’s Knox and Waldo Counties.

Waldo County, which includes the city of Belfast (pop. 7,000) comprises half of the Midcoast Villager’s coverage area. The Villager has had more delivery problems in Waldo County than in Knox County, Blackmore told me. (He referred to one Belfast subscriber as his “bellwether” for delivery issues because she always emails when the paper doesn’t arrive on time.) Knox County has its own delivery problems, but they’re concentrated in just two ZIP codes — which “makes them kind of a different postal universe,” Blackmore said.

As the group circulation manager for MaineStay Media, Cathy Marshall is on the front lines of delivery delay complaints not only for the Villager, but also The Ellsworth American and Mount Desert Islander. “We get calls every day, all day long,” she said, along with angry emails. “It’s such a bummer…it’s disheartening.”

In Michigan, Eric Hamp is the third generation of his family to serve as publisher and editor of the Houghton Lake Resorter (fifth-generation, counting other newspapers the family has owned), which covers Roscommon County. Eric and his brother, Bryan, the Resorter’s production manager and part-owner, exemplify the ever-rarer tradition of family newspaper succession and ownership. The Hamps also own and publish the Crawford County Avalanche, and they still operate their own printing press. “We have people that come in the office right when the paper’s coming off the press because they want it,” Eric Hamp told me. “If we’re late, we know, because they’re waiting here.”

The complaints about major delays and missed deliveries started last August, Hamp said. The Resorter received more than 60 complaints, but it’s difficult to know the actual number of subscribers having problems because he doesn’t know how many people aren’t complaining. “Let’s say we’re sending 10 papers to a ZIP code and two people complain — well, that means that 10 people probably experienced the same issue,” he said.

After slowing down for a while, complaints picked up again in mid-December. “When we’re fighting against something that we really have no control over, that’s terribly frustrating,” Hamp said, “because I can’t afford to lose a subscriber,” let alone many.

Most of the delivery issues are for out-of-county subscribers, including in the Detroit metro area, which hurts the Resorter because many of its subscribers own second homes in Roscommon County. “If the township is going to change their zoning, they want to know about that before they get up to their place on the weekends,” Hamp said. “When they can’t get their newspaper, it’s upsetting to them.” (In the rarer event of local, one-off delivery issues, Hamp has sometimes gone so far as to deliver issues to homes himself.)

David Bordewyk, executive director of the South Dakota NewsMedia Association (SDNA), told me he started hearing from members about worsening delivery problems last spring. Publishers had long struggled with out-of-state delivery, he said, but problems delivering newspapers “to the community down the road 20 miles or in the next county” were new.

To get more context on these delays, in July, the SDNA surveyed its members. It received responses from around 50 publishers documenting around 150 examples of delivery problems. In a follow-up survey in November, members said the problems were either the same or had gotten worse.

“I’m confident in telling you…100% of our newspapers are having problems with delivery,” Bordewyk said. “It’s across the board, across the state…It’s a grass fire.” Because so much local advertising is time-sensitive (think auctions, open houses, legal notices, and invitations for project bids), the delays have threatened subscription and advertising revenue. “It’s a double whammy.”

“Regional Transportation Optimization”

Matt Paxton wears many hats. He’s the fourth-generation publisher of The News-Gazette, a weekly newspaper in Lexington, Va., that serves that city, nearby Buena Vista, and surrounding Rockbridge County. And as “postal chair” for the National Newspaper Association and the successor of its “longtime postal guru,” he’s also well-situated to explain the delays frustrating publishers across the country.

The delays are grounded in USPS’s continuing quest to break even. In 2021, Trump-appointed Postmaster General Louis DeJoy rolled out the 10-year Delivering for America plan, which was supposed to help USPS break even by 2023. Instead, it has continued to lose billions of dollars annually, even as double-digit rate increases have “driven all kinds of mail volume out of the system,” Paxton said. He called it “an absolute disaster.”

Paxton acknowledges that some of the changes USPS is making are necessary. “They’re trying to make it more efficient, and that’s certainly needed,” he said, “but they’re doing it on the back of all the rate payers and they haven’t cut costs [enough].” The rate increases alone have “been a real problem for newspapers that are already on the edge” — including his own News-Gazette.

Paxton traced many of the recent delays — specifically, the longer delivery times publishers are seeing for subscribers outside their local areas — to a practice called Regional Transportation Optimization (RTO), which was adopted last year. RTO added at least one day to delivery times for mail originating from or going to post offices more than 50 miles away from regional sortation facilities. Two trucks a day used to transport mail between processing facilities and post offices; now, for the post offices outside the 50-mile mark, it’s one truck a day. The RTO changes, Paxton explained, have increased delivery times for “community newspapers delivering to their more distant subscribers, particularly in rural areas.”

“What they’ve in essence done,” Paxton said, “is create a two-tier delivery system: One for urban and suburban areas, and one for rural areas. And us people in the rural areas are now the second-class citizens of the Postal Service.”

The USPS denies this. “The Postal Service has a close working relationship with the newspaper industry and meets frequently with newspaper organization representatives,” USPS spokesperson Tara Jarrett told me in an email. Regional Transportation Optimization “is one part of the nationwide service standards refinements which were fully implemented in July 2025.” It “does not change delivery,” she said, but instead focuses on “more efficient collection, transportation, and processing of mail and packages.”

“RTO is based upon a standard rule that applies equally to customers throughout all delivery areas — urban and rural,” Jarrett added. “The majority of mail and package volume, including those destined to rural communities, originate and are pre-sorted in ZIP Codes within 50 miles of a regional hub.”

“Exceptional Dispatch” and other (partial) solutions

USPS advises newspapers with fewer than 25,000 annual subscribers to apply for a program called “Exceptional Dispatch,” which helps publishers get better local delivery service by letting them deliver newspapers directly to post offices. Many NNA members pay to participate in this program, Paxton said, and they have “seen little degradation in service in areas where we take advantage of Exceptional Dispatch.”

An example: In Paxton’s Rockbridge County, there are 11 post offices. Instead of all the News-Gazette’s mail going to the Lexington post office, getting bounced to Richmond, and returning to the outlying post offices perhaps a week later, Exceptional Dispatch means The News-Gazette trucks those papers straight to all other county post offices at its own expense. Newspapers take on that extra expense “in the interest of service,” Paxton said.

In Michigan, Hamp told me the Resorter takes advantage of Exceptional Dispatch locally. The majority of its delivery problems are out-of-county, though, and Exceptional Dispatch doesn’t help with those.

Similarly, Bordewyk told me that some South Dakota newspapers use Exceptional Dispatch for nearby destinations. It can be a good tool, he said, but doesn’t solve “the scale and scope of delivery problems South Dakota newspapers have been facing this past year.”

Through South Dakota’s congressional delegation, Bordewyk has learned about USPS delays affecting delivery of other kinds of mail. Part of the problem, he said, is that some mail processing and sortation that was previously handled in-state is now handled by plants in North Dakota and Nebraska — an example of Postal Service consolidation in the face of shrinking mail volume. Delays are especially acute for newspapers, he said, because they’re usually sorted and processed manually. “Oftentimes, that stuff stacks up in a corner, and it’ll sit there until they have time to deal with it,” he said. (The USPS’s Jarrett confirmed that newspapers “are typically treated as non-machinable” because they “tear/shred if attempted to run on a machine.”)

MaineStay Media’s Marshall told me the uptick in phone calls about delivery began around summer 2024, well before the RTO implementation, because of other changes and cuts to USPS service. Since last fall, truck route changes affecting both The Ellsworth American and Mount Desert Islander have led to even more complaints. Changes to where newspapers are printed, with presses closing and consolidating under their own set of financial pressures, have also complicated matters — now that these Maine papers are printed further away, in Portland, publishers have less control over local deliveries, Marshall added.

Marshall described an ad-hoc solution for the Villager’s Waldo County newspapers. Instead of getting bounced from a local post office to a distribution center, they’re now sent straight from the printer to the distribution center, streamlining delivery and reducing delays. “Changing how we enter the system and limiting the number of jumps that are often, to the lay eye, highly illogical…has made it a lot better,” Blackmore said.

Trying to get to the bottom of the cause of delays in an opaque system, Blackmore added, has required good old-fashioned relationship building and phone calls. “A lot of untangling [the problems] has just been calling the postal masters,” he said. “The only way we can tease apart [where the papers are] is to talk to the people that touch them.”

Like others I spoke with, Hamp emphasized that local postmasters are not the issue. “Our local post offices are wonderful,” he said. “I have nothing bad to say about them.” But the degraded USPS system means that a phone call that would have fixed an issue a decade ago now leads to a local postmasters as helpless as Hamp is in a broken system.

“When there was a problem, we could go to our postmaster and they could tell us, ‘hey, let me make a call,'” Hamp said. Today, that “downstream stuff…is not necessarily there anymore.”

Bordewyk’s fear, he said, is, “it won’t get better.”

“I just don’t think they can fix it anymore,” he said. “They’re so far down the path of what they’ve done within their own network…I don’t think the pieces can be put back together.”

“Like turning the Queen Mary”

In December, Paxton was part of an NNA delegation to meet with Postmaster General David Steiner. (DeJoy stepped down last March.) In an update to NNA members describing the meeting, Paxton wrote that “the NNA team emphasized our reliance on the Postal Service and our entwined history in promoting an informed citizenry,” and also “expressed our concerns about increasingly erratic delivery times in general and the dramatic increase in mail rates over the past five years.” The delegation’s asks included new steps to get newspapers into the Postal Service’s “delivery measurement system”; “individual piece scans, like those done on packages and other barcoded mail, would give us complete visibility of newspaper mail from acceptance to delivery,” helping resolve the mystery of where newspapers are in the delivery black hole. (“Newspapers are not eligible for special services such as tracking,” Jarrett said.)

“Postmaster General Steiner was attentive,” Paxton wrote, “but didn’t indicate that he plans to deviate at this time from the USPS’s Delivering for America Plan.” Still, the cordial meeting left the delegation hopeful that this postal administration will be receptive to its concerns. (It turns out Steiner was once a paper boy.)

The NNA is continuing to work with USPS on systemic issues raised by members, Paxton said, including problems isolated to specific “three-digit prefix” ZIP codes. These appear to be separate from the RTO changes, and more rooted in “processing and routing issues.” He feels that USPS has been responsive and helpful in working through those area-specific problems.

The USPS’ troubles do not have easy fixes. “It’s like turning the Queen Mary,” Paxton said. “It’s not easily done.”

Newspapers may be a tiny part of the mailing industry, he added, “but we have a saying that newspapers and periodicals are the anchor in the mailbox. We’re the reason that people want to go to their mailbox.”