Ben Franklin would be horrified at what the Postal Service is doing to newspapers

As if local newspapers didn’t have enough to contend with, they are now being threatened by the Postal Service. According to Jacob Bogage of The Washington Post, newspapers are simply not being delivered in some parts of the country because of the recent mail meltdown. And publishers are facing a rate increase of as much as 9% in 2022, cutting deeply into their already precarious bottom lines.

“These are little, tiny rural communities, and typically papers like mine are the only sources of information about that community,” Brett Wesner, chair of the National Newspaper Association and publisher of 12 papers in Texas, Oklahoma and New Mexico, told Bogage. “Most don’t have digital coverage of any kind. Most don’t have radio stations. We are the source of community information, both in terms of covering community events but also the city council, the school board, the county commission.”

It’s not an exaggeration to say that American newspapers were built on reliable postal service and affordable rates. As the Post notes, the first postmaster general was Benjamin Franklin, who was himself a newspaper publisher. Paul Starr, in his sweeping history of journalism, “The Creation of the Media” (2004), wrote that newspapers were given a boost starting in Colonial times through postal subsidies. By contrast, European governments, more wary of the press, kept postal rates artificially high.

In his book “Democracy without Journalism?” (2019), Victor Pickard put it this way:

Because the postal system served a higher civic purpose as a news and information infrastructure upon which a self-governing populace depended, policymakers determined that the state would directly subsidize the dissemination of newspapers with low postal rates.

That policy, Pickard wrote, was supported by founders such as George Washington and James Madison and prevailed until the “market fundamentalists” of the Reagan era began to argue that the Postal Service should be run like a business and turn a profit. And, of course, that move was hypercharged under President Donald Trump, who appointed an unqualified (at best) postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, who undermined postal operations in what may have been an attempt to suppress mail-in voting and help Trump win re-election.

So why not shift to digital delivery? That option is available to larger daily papers, especially as the steep decline of advertising takes away one of the last remaining reasons for having a print edition. The Salt Lake Tribune, our only nonprofit major metro, is moving from daily to weekly print in order to save money.

But the tiny newspapers, mostly weeklies, to which Brett Wesner refers most likely don’t have that option. Their communities may not have broadband, and the papers themselves may not even have websites. Print is vital for them to be able to serve the public. Unfortunately, it looks like one of Trump’s final legacies will be to make it that much harder for them to survive.

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