Inscribed on the facade of The James A. Farley United States Post Office Building in NYC: “Neither Snow Nor Rain Nor Heat Nor Gloom of Night Stays These Couriers From the Swift Completion of their Appointed Rounds”
Beginning with our March 24th issue, The Hernando Sun newspaper was delivered to the Post Office in a different way. We used a process available to periodicals called exceptional dispatch. This allows the Post Office to deliver the newspaper much faster. Most of our in county subscribers received the paper within a day after mailing it out. This is an important change for our subscribers.
While the inscription on the James A. Farley Building doesn’t mention anything about sleep, we thought that was appropriate since the process of getting faster delivery may have caused us to lose some sleep.
Over the past year we have been printing the papers on Tuesday, because mail delivery using the previous method could take 3 to 7 days. Many of our subscribers were upset that they received the paper after the weekend and therefore some of the events were not useful.
Previously we had to drop the papers off at a local post office and then they were sent Tampa. From Tampa, they were returned to Hernando County and delivered. Now we drop the newspapers off at the post offices in Hernando County and only the papers that need to be sent to Tampa leave the county (papers delivered to out of county subscribers are sent to Tampa).
Printing on Tuesday means that we cannot cover news that breaks later in the week. That is why we have now changed to printing on Wednesday given the success of next day delivery for in county subscribers.
The only time we printed on an alternate day was when we printed the Wednesday after election day. The staff felt that the election results were too important to wait until the next paper.
Printing Wednesday lets us include additional information that we were unable to include previously, for instance the movie schedules which are released Tuesday afternoon.
The process of switching delivery to exceptional dispatch was complicated and we received much support from the Post Office, the National Newspaper Association, Interlink, Landmark Community Newspapers and The Citrus Chronicle for which we are truly grateful.
Of course, no system is perfect 100% of the time and there could be occasional delivery issues. If you are an in county subscriber and you do not receive your newspaper in the mail on Thursday, please notify your post office or call us at 352-238-5454 so we can find a solution to the situation.