Jim and Sharon Aderman, like thousands of others, live in Lincoln County seasonally, splitting the year evenly between Damariscotta and Topeka, Kan. They began subscribing to The Lincoln County News 14 years ago.
In Oct. 2010, for the first time Sharon Aderman can remember, the Adermans didn’t receive their newspaper. As of Dec. 28, they’ve received one October, two November and one December edition, some arriving out of sequence – for example, the Nov. 4 edition preceded the Oct. 28 edition by about a week.
For as long as two months, the Adermans didn’t get a newspaper at all, Sharon Aderman, who writes the News’ “Ponder and Stir” column, said. The Adermans have corresponded with office personnel at The Lincoln County News and contacted their postmasters in Damariscotta and Topeka – so far, to no avail.
At the time of a Dec. 28 phone interview with Sharon Aderman, the Adermans were in Florida on vacation. When they return home, “Hopefully we’ll have a pile,” Sharon Aderman said. “There’s a snag somewhere and we haven’t figured out where.”
The Adermans aren’t an isolated case, according to Fran Roberts, the bookkeeper at The Lincoln County News and a member of the Roberts family, the longtime publishers of the newspaper.
“The Midwest and Florida seem to be the worst,” Roberts said, as well as the western states. The Adermans’ situation – receiving newspapers out of sequence – is a recurring one. Some subscribers reported receiving issues from October and December on the same day but have yet to receive a November edition.
The Lincoln County News staff delivers each week’s edition to the Newcastle Post Office on Wednesdays about 3 p.m., Roberts said. Usually the newspapers, which ship periodical class, should arrive within a week, even out west.
Abbie Roberts, a former Editor of The Lincoln County News and wife of Publisher Emeritus Sam Roberts, spends most of the winter in South Carolina. “If it’s good, I get mine on Monday,” she said.
“The last couple years, it’s got worse – they’re just degrading week to week,” said The Lincoln County News publisher Chris Roberts Dec. 23.
“We’ve got one way to get the papers delivered – they’re protected,” Chris Roberts said, referring to the United States Postal Service (USPS). “If I knew where the hang ups in the postal system are, I could do something about it but it seems to be different places at different times.”
Before the advance of the Internet and modern tracking technology, USPS would manually track an individual newspaper to determine the root of a problem.
“They’d follow it and see… where it got stalled,” Chris Roberts said. “They had to figure out where the bottleneck was.” Now, it’s easier to track packages, but “no one’s looking at” the data, he said.
The change, along with a consolidation of sorting facilities, has contributed to the current delivery issues, Roberts said.
Max Heath has been the Postal Chair of the National Newspaper Association for 27 years.
“I have heard enough to indicate that the northeast, and Maine in particular, are a problem,” Heath wrote in a Dec. 27 e-mail to The Lincoln County News. “I believe some of the problem to be related to [the] creation of network distribution centers [NDCs] and problems plants closer to your mail are having at getting the mail to the NDC.”
According to Heath, “Short staffing, required by postal service losses, and new personnel who are poorly trained may also contribute to the problem, coupled with the fall mailing/Christmas season…
“The snowbirds are typically the problem, as [Florida, Texas] and other such states get an influx of mail that they only have during the winter… but I think a good bit of the Maine problem is at origin plants,” Heath wrote.
According to Heath, “While [delays have been] an unfortunate fact of life for a long time, we’ve seen some significant worsing [sic] of this problem this year with the change of a sortation level known as [Mixed Area Distribution Center] changing from a processing plant closer to Maine, [Springfield, Mass.] to the New Jersey NDC.”
“We take every mail delivery complaint seriously,” Tom Rizzo, a spokesman for the Northern New England District of USPS, wrote in a Dec. 28 e-mail to The Lincoln County News. “When alerted to a service issue, our Consumer Affairs specialists investigate and follow up as necessary until the problem is fixed.”
According to Rizzo, improving periodical service is “a national priority” for USPS. The agency admits “some issues with out-of-state subscription newspaper delivery” and is “working cooperatively with publishers and mailers to improve,” he wrote.
According to statistics cited by Rizzo, USPS’ Northeast Area “scored at 82.2 percent on-time” service performance for periodicals in the fourth quarter of the 2010 fiscal year.” Nationally, this statistic is 4.4 percent higher than a year ago and 97.4 percent of periodicals are delivered “within service standard plus three days.”
“There has been a realignment of our mail processing facilities to better reflect declining mail volumes,” Rizzo wrote. “This allows us to make the best and most efficient use of fewer resources.”
While it may be little comfort to seasonal subscribers unable to keep tabs on relatives in Maine and the communities they relish returning to in the summer, The Lincoln County News will continue to mail its print edition every Wednesday afternoon.
The Lincoln County News maintains a website at www.lincolncountynewsonline.com that features breaking news, sports and some of the stories carried in the print edition.
Subscribers can always access LCN’s E-Edition, a .pdf file of the complete newspaper, as it appears print, via the website using their last name and the subscriber code on their mailing labels as the password.