Dan's Papers - September 21, 2007

I have tried mightily over the years to get Dan's Papers delivered to our subscribers around the country in a timely fashion at a reasonable cost. But something involving postal rates has always stood in our way.

For many years, at the beginning, we could not qualify for Second Class mailing privileges because the Post Office would not recognize that we were a newspaper. This was understandable at the beginning - Dan's Papers, founded in 1960, was the first free newspaper ever published in America - but you would think that after maybe ten years as free newspapers proliferated around the country and around the world, they would have gotten the idea. But they didn't.

I recall talking to the Post Office back then about how the dissemination of news was the very reason the Post Office was founded back in the eighteenth century. When Washington created the Post Office, the government ordered that 80% of its budget be used to subsidize newspapers so they could get "hurry-up" news to the citizenry in just a day or two if possible. I also told them that freedom of the press could sometimes mean that the newspaper was free, just like it was free on radio and TV. But it didn't make any difference.

We could only get Third Class mail permits. Slow and expensive. The Second Class mail was for the newspapers that got paid for. That was how people got their news.

I recall that at that time Dave Wilmott, who publishes the free Suffolk Life newspaper in Riverhead, which is almost as old as this one, actually went to the trouble to publish a separate newspaper that people could buy for 25 cents. It had about a 200-copy circulation and the Post Office people gave him a Second Class permit for that. His much larger, free paper ran as an insert in the paid one, and then in addition a press run of tens of thousands of extra copies. But I never got around to doing that.

My mother, who for the last fifteen years of her life lived in Florida (instead of Montauk where she could go down to the store and pick up a Dan's Papers), was always calling to tell me about a wonderful article she just read that day which I had written. It had come out two weeks earlier, of course.

I know that today the Internet is a blessing when it comes to all of this. All you have to do is go to www.DansHamptons.com and click on the "read the latest issue" button on the Dan's Papers rectangle. But still. Some people just want to hold a newspaper in their hands when they read it.

To those people, all I can say is that I tried. Currently, Dan's Papers is printed in Voorhees, New Jersey. Until three months ago, the deal was that they would truck the fifty tons of this newspaper up to the Hamptons, we would sort it by zip code, bag it, stamp it and then take it to the Bridgehampton Post Office and they would have it trucked to the nearest regional Post Office Depot, which is in Melville, Long Island. There, they would send it on to the various Post Offices that were indicated by the zip codes and they would either be put into Post Office Boxes or sent out on rural delivery routes to metal mailboxes. It would take fourteen days. And it would cost about a buck a copy in the wintertime and two bucks a copy in the summertime. Just for the postage.

Once I spent the two bucks to mail a copy from Bridgehampton to myself in East Hampton just to see what would happen. I brought it to the Bridgehampton Post Office and it went into the system and traveled the wrong way up to Melville and then back east to the East Hampton Post Office, finally landing in my mailbox fourteen days later, but just the cover. There was a note. It said the rest of this mail had been damaged when it went through a sorter in Melville. We were welcome to file a complaint.

Our printer in Voorhees, New Jersey looked at all of this and said they would like to try it in New Jersey to see if it had better luck there. They print lots of newspapers and they do the sorting, stamping and bagging for most of them and if they could get it to our readers faster would we do it? We said give it a try.

Their regional office was in Camden, New Jersey. But it turned out that when Camden got it, they trucked it up to Melville, Long Island anyway and all it did was add another day and a half. At least according to my mother.

In the end, I went back to the old way, with a new plan for our trucks at Dan's Papers to deliver the paper in its bags directly to Melville. It didn't help either. So back we went to delivering it to Bridgehampton.

I do think the Postal Service is caught between a rock and a hard place. The times have changed. And the higher-ups have not been able to change the Postal Service with it.

Although its not true that Post Office workers go off their nut more than others, nevertheless the term "going postal" has entered the lexicon. Also going into the lexicon is "snail mail."

So it works if you want to tell somebody you haven't paid that the check is in the mail.

My hat is off to everyone who works in the local Post Offices. They have a hard job to do. And if you need some sort of personalized service, such as if you need to deliver things certified or registered or something, it's a good thing they are there.

On the other hand, the Post Office recently changed how they charge for the delivery of mail so that it now includes different prices involving whether you send something lumpy or flat. Many people say that the new rules are so confusing, and with so many exceptions and extra charges, you need a company Postal Service Employee Manager to figure it all out.

It's also true that some scientists have recently figured out a way where you can send something by email in such a way that when it gets where it is going it can be printed out, not on a sheet of paper, but as a lump of something. So you can email a pencil sharpener and then download at the receiving end a pencil sharpener. I am not making this up. It's like you have a special printer and it gives birth. But I think it's all made out of papier maché or something.

As far as Dan's Papers is concerned, I have really come to the conclusion that if you cannot find a way to pick a paper up in our 1,400 locations on the East End or the 300 locations in Manhattan, the cheapest way to get the paper is to have it delivered by one of our delivery drivers all dressed up in a tuxedo. He would arrive in a limousine, deliver your own personal copy, get a signed receipt, take a little bow and then return to Bridgehampton.