The publisher of the Hurley-based Iron County Miner is still battling with the United States Postal Service over lagging delivery times for her publications and other Wisconsin newspapers.
Autumn Hill recently made an appeal directly to Miner readers to send their complaints to USPS. And, US Postal Inspectors visited area post offices — not in response to her complaints, but in response to letters sent by US Senator Tammy Baldwin and US Rep. Tom Tiffany.
“I’ve spoken to many of you this year, and especially these past two months, about the lengthy delays you’re experiencing with the mail and getting your paper,” wrote Hill in a Facebook post last week. “I’m extremely frustrated, as are you, and I want to share what I’ve done so far as a result of our conversations.”
She urged readers to write directly to the US Postmaster General, who testified before Congress recently about problems associated with rural newspaper delivery resulting from the “Delivering for America” program instituted by USPS. He can be reached at this address:
Postmaster General Louis DeJoy
USPS – Headquarters
475 L’Enfant Plaza, SW
Washington, DC 20260
Last week, postal inspectors visited — not with her, but instead, with the post offices handling her newspaper — to determine why the USPS is taking two to three weeks to deliver the Miner.
One of the problems Hill said is that she believed her papers were being delivered directly to the post office in Green Bay, but instead are ending up on a USPS dock in Rhinelander for several days.
“That’s the point in the process that we’re trying to figure out right now. And I’m hopeful that the inspectors — they were here Wednesday and yesterday, our papers got sent through, so I’m hopeful that they’re in Green Bay today, although I have no way of knowing that,” Hill said.
Hill estimated her staff spends 5-10 hours per week handling delivery complaints in addition to her staff writing stories and her own letters written to government officials about the delivery problems.
“We’ve written in the newspaper, so we’ve been getting complaints — there’s always some kind of delivery delay over the past year, but August and September, it was just unprecedented,” Hill said, adding that her staff also receives daily delivery calls. “Literally, every single day of the week that we were open, I was getting a call from somebody complaining about the delivery of their newspaper, and then this week, I had two calls in one day, so it’s a lot of time.”
She said she watched DeJoy’s testimony to Congress and was particularly miffed by his statements about the Iron County Miner, and the first thing he said was that the newspaper industry is under duress.
“Well, what does that have to do with delivering the newspaper?” Hill asked in an interview for Weekly Briefing. “Thanks for the advice, or the opinion about the state of our industry, but that really doesn’t have anything to do with your job, which is delivering the paper.”
Hill pointed out Wisconsin newspaper publishers are paying thousands of dollars for a service that is not improving, but in fact, deteriorating.
“You know, he’s the leader of the post office, and he’s all about efficiency and saving money. So if that’s true, that’s more of an indictment on his leadership and budgetary talents than anything having to do with anything we’re doing,” Hill said.
“I don’t know if you watched his testimony from Thursday, but I posted a video of it on our Facebook page yesterday, a five minute clip that I made of the two hours of testimony where he’s asked specifically about Wisconsin newspapers,” Hill said, referring to the clip that has been shared along with her post on the WNA’s Facebook page. “And it’s very insightful. So if you haven’t watched that yet, I would highly recommend you do that.”
The goal of the complaints and the inspections, Hill said, is to get newspaper delivery to return to normal.
“We love our local post office. We love our local workers,” Hill said. “We’ve worked with them for years and years, and like I’ve mentioned, we’re a 140-year-old newspaper, so we have a good relationship with everybody here, and we’re just trying to weather this unprecedented time of upheaval in the post office and this pilot program that they’ve used to blow up the mail service in Wisconsin.
“So I hope that all gets resolved and they figure out how to deliver the mail again in our state,” Hill said, “and that’s it.”
