For more than a century, the Peninsula Daily News has served our readers as the leading local news and information source on the North Olympic Peninsula.
As we look to the future, we remain committed to producing the same accurate and trustworthy journalism our readers have come to expect from the Peninsula Daily News.
However, doing that critical work requires changing how we produce our newspaper.
The PDN already had moved to all-mail delivery because of a scarcity of carriers. That means that readers receive their papers with their mail rather each morning.
They also do not get paper editions on paper on federal holidays, of which there are 10 more in 2023.
The past two Mondays, the PDN has been offered only online because of federal holidays. Since both Christmas and New Year’s Day were on Sundays, the post office had the following Mondays as holidays.
On this upcoming Monday, Jan. 9, we will permanently move our Monday edition to a digital-only day where readers can get the entire print edition online at PeninsulaDailyNews.com or on the PDN app. Tuesday through Saturday editions will be delivered by mail.
Also, all editions, whether on federal holidays or not, are produced in full online. On federal holidays, they are online only at PeninsulaDailyNews.com or on the PDN app.
Print subscribers have digital access for no additional cost.
The postal service does not deliver on Sundays, so when the PDN moved to all-mail delivery, we also packed Sunday features into a weekend Saturday-Sunday edition that publishes on Saturday.
These include an expanded Commentary section; Eye on Peninsula, which tells of government meetings planned on the Peninsula the following week; a list of upcoming business meetings and the schedule of KONP’s Todd Ortloff’s show; marriage licenses, wedding and birth announcements and centennial birthdays when they have been announced to the PDN; and a four-page color comics section.
Saturdays also contain local columnists Andrew May, who writes a weekly gardening column; Karen Griffith’s monthly Horseplay; and John McNutt’s Back When history column.
Syndicated column presented on Saturday include Parent to Parent, Millennial Life, People’s Pharmacy, Pet Connection, Social Qs and, if space permits, Milk Street recipes and Nerdwallets, which deal with financial issues.
The PDN will continue to bolster our Saturday newspaper content for our readers.
Additionally, on Monday, Jan. 9, we will discontinue publishing the daily TV listings in the newspaper.
“This will no doubt be a difficult change for those who depend on these listings to plan their television viewing for the evening,” said Terry Ward, publisher.
“Unfortunately, it no longer makes sense to devote time and resources to publish these listings when there are many other places online our readers can access this information.”
Delivering newspapers by mail isn’t a new thing. The practice has been around since the nation’s infancy. Congress wanted the U.S. Postal Service to send newspapers and periodicals to subscribers at a nominal cost, and in some cases for free.
In the first major postal law, passed in 1792, the rate was a penny for up to 100 miles and 1½ cents for anything beyond that, according to a history of the U.S. Postal Service. On the other hand, letter writers were charged 6 cents to 25 cents depending on distance traveled.
Two hundred and thirty years later, the Peninsula Daily News joined newspapers in this state and around the country turning to the postal service to get a paper in the hands of subscribers.
Although not cheap, mail has emerged as the best — and possibly last — option to preserve the tradition of home delivery in the face of a continuing shortage of workers willing to deliver the paper each morning.
Delivery drivers are in short supply these days, lured away by better-paying food delivery jobs and other more lucrative gigs, without the early morning hours.
With that roadblock, publishers across the United States are choosing to mail their newspapers to cope with driver shortages, high fuel costs and the general decline of print newspaper subscribers, according to the Wall Street Journal.
