The publisher of the Odessa American found it so difficult to find workers to deliver the West Texas newspaper in recent years that at one point he handled the job himself.
Then earlier this year, Patrick Canty, the paper’s publisher for two decades, cut the paper’s print circulation from seven days a week to two and started mailing the issues to subscribers using the U.S. Postal Service’s same-day delivery option instead of relying on delivery drivers.
Many local news publishers across the U.S. are choosing to mail their newspapers to subscribers as they cope with driver shortages—a problem exacerbated by high fuel costs, wage inflation and the secular decline of the newspaper industry that has meant that subscribers in some areas are too few and far between for traditional delivery to make sense.
