Published March 4, 2024 at 6:52 p.m.
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- File: Courtney Lamdin ©️ Seven Days
- The Free Press office in Williston
On April 1, the Burlington Free Press will start mailing its papers to subscribers instead of using contractors to drop papers off.
The paper’s parent company, Gannett, announced the move last week in a post that cited “ongoing challenges with our newspaper delivery caused by a variety of economic factors.”"The round-the-clock online news cycle has made digital products the first choice for breaking news, and print subscribers are increasingly engaging digitally," the Free Press said in its own statement last week. "As such, the Free Press will be putting renewed emphasis on the printed newspaper as a place readers can dive into local news with more impact and context, feel-good community features, sports analysis and commentary — the stories you can’t get anywhere else."
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"We know that by the time our informed readers pick up the paper, they know what happened yesterday — the print newspaper should provide additional context, to help readers better understand their community and the world around them," he said.Readers of the Free Press, which is published every day except Saturday, will likely notice the change. Mail delivery in many parts of Vermont has been spotty for years. And on Sundays and federal holidays, there will be no paper at all.
“Your newspaper will be delivered the next day there is postal delivery available,” Gannett said in its statement.
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"The transition from carrier to U.S. Postal Service delivery will ensure we can provide a more consistent experience for our valued Free Press subscribers," a company spokesperson said in a email. "We also encourage readers to visit us regularly on our digital platforms, as well as access our eNewspaper, a digital replica of the newspaper.”
In recent years, the Free Press has seen a dramatic fall in print subscribers as the company has embraced a digital-first model, pushing readers to its website — much of which is behind a paywall. As of September, the paper's average weekday print circulation was just 3,705 — down 27 percent from the 5,084 it reported in March 2023, according tothe Alliance for Audited Media. Over the same time period, Sunday circulation fell from 6,681 to 4,601 — a drop of nearly one-third.
Two years ago, the newsroom — which moved to Williston in 2021 — was down to 10 reporters and three editors.
With little in the way of breaking news, the delivery change will probably not mean much for people who follow Vermont news closely, said Kevin Ellis, a former Free Press reporter and longtime lobbyist. Ellis, who now works as a public relations consultant and has a weekly radio show on WDEV, said he's sad to see the state of an institution that was once a critical component of Vermont's political world.
"When you’re owned by a giant corporation and all you care about is shareholder profit, you can’t care about the public good," Ellis said. That, he said, shows in the lack of news coverage and is the reason for the drop in readership.
"Gannett made its own bed," he said.
The Freeps isn't the first local newspaper to switch to mail-only delivery. Vermont News & Media, the company that owns the Brattleboro Reformer, Bennington Banner and Manchester Journal, made the move a few years ago.
In an interview on Monday, the company's president and publisher, Jordan Brechenser, said he immediately heard from readers, many of them older, who were unhappy that they no longer had the paper in hand first thing in the morning. Some subscribers missed their paper for days at a time, he said, and then received several copies at once.
After some of the Bennington Banner's 3,500 subscribers canceled, Brechenser created something he calls "white glove service," where customers can pay $280 per year to have a courier deliver the paper every morning.About 200 Banner customers use that, he said.To improve deliveries for the rest, Brechenser worked closely with regional postal officials.
"I battled with the post office for six months, if not longer," he said, and saw some service improvements. But in getting to know postal managers and workers, he learned that most small towns just have two or three carriers. If someone calls in sick, routes go uncovered.
“Realistically, there always seem to be routes down,” Brechenser said of the rural southern Vermont communities that the company serves.
He added that newspapers are also competing unsuccessfully with Amazon.
“In this world of online shopping, Amazon gets preferential treatment," he said. "Whatever contract they negotiated, I assume Amazon spends billions compared to my couple of hundred thousand.”
ButBrechenser said moving to the postal service is worth it, because he couldn't find people willing to work as carriers.
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“We reached the point where it was impossible to get reliable delivery. Now it is consistent and on time,” Imtiaz Patel, chief consumer officer at Gannett, told Poynter.
In Vermont, few people associate consistency and on-time delivery with the U.S. Postal Service. In the past several years, the service has struggled publicly with a lack of staffing and administrative problems that leave gaps in mail coverage, sometimes for days, in many towns.
The postal service recently announceda proposal to move much of its local mail processing to Hartford, Conn., a shift that some customers fear could create more delays. Stephen Doherty, a strategic communications specialist for the U.S. Postal Service in Boston, said on Monday that the move wouldn't affect newspapers.
"I'm assuming you won’t be dropping the [newspapers] in blue collection boxes but dropping them directly at one of our local processing facilities for local delivery," he said of the Free Press, which is printed in New Hampshire.
Newspapers around the country are struggling to survive as their traditional source of revenue, display advertising, increasingly moves online. Earlier this month, the Associated Press published a long list of recent layoffs and buyouts at venerable institutions such as the Los Angeles Times, Sports Illustrated, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal.
Local newspapers closed last year at an average of 2.5 per week, according to a November studyfrom Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism.
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