When Portland writer Kate Haas grew up on the East Coast, she got The New York Times delivered daily. “In addition to The Wall Street Journal and The Bergen Record!” she adds. “I’m a newspaper-on-the-porch type of person. And I’m not willing to give it up.” Even though she now lives in the Southeast Portland neighborhood of Sunnyside, she still gets the physical New York Times every day. At least she did — until mid-January, when the city came to a standstill during the ice storm. And the paper didn’t come. “I was expecting that,” she says. “But then the ice and snow melted and there was still no paper. Then it was just like weeks and weeks with no paper.” She called the Times’ customer service line weekly; she reported her paper missing on her account, and received credit for the missing papers. Eventually, customer service asked her to fill out a questionnaire about her experience. “I was irate at that point,” recalls Haas. “I said something like, ‘I really wish you would investigate what’s going on in Southeast Portland, because everybody I know is not getting their paper.’” Unbeknownst to print-loving Portlanders, in January The New York Times had quietly switched carriers from the Oregonian Media Group to PCF (Publishers Circulation Fulfillment), which is a Hunt Valley, Maryland-based “delivery service provider.” Haas did not find this out from the Times but from a community message board she belongs to called Being Neighborly. “Somebody posted that there was this new guy, Keith, who was in charge. So I texted him and he was like, ‘Yes, it’s a new carrier… they are ironing out the kinks. It’s gonna be a transition, yada yada,’” Haas recalls. Why did The New York Times stop contracting with the Oregonian Media Group? I wrote the communications department at the Times to find out. New York Times senior communications manager Elizabeth MacAulay Young responded, saying that in late 2023, the Times was notified by their longtime distributor, The Oregonian, that it would no longer be doing home-delivery services for “outside publications” in the Portland area as of January 2024. “In order to maintain distribution in the Portland market, we immediately found an alternative distributor and are continuing to work with them to provide the best home- delivery service experience possible to our customers,” MacAulay Young wrote via email. In response to questions about unhappy customers who haven’t been receiving the paper, she continued: “We are reviewing any delivery issues and are reaching out to customers directly to address their needs.” That “alternative distributor” is PCF. Keith Miller, the person Haas texted and PCF’s facility manager in Portland, would not reply to repeated requests for comment. But before I’d gotten this assignment and was just another frustrated subscriber, I had gotten his number the same way Haas did. Back then, in mid-March, I’d asked him what the issue was. “Finding good carriers,” he texted back. “We are recruiting heavily every day, and we’re getting better in other areas. We will have this turned around very soon, and I greatly appreciate your patience.” In early July, online job-board site Indeed’s posting to be a PCF newspaper carrier in Portland was now offering a $1,000 sign-on bonus. The posting also said the job would pay a flat $400 to $475 a week in the Portland area for a seven-day-a-week route, and that applicants need to be at least 18 and have their own vehicle as well as proof of insurance. (Gone are the days of hiring teenagers who do delivery routes on their bikes.) Perhaps the sign-on bonus is helping to attract more reliable delivery carriers. James Cunningham, vice president of communications at PCF, declined to comment for this story, saying, “PCF serves a broad range of publishers and publications. We take a very conservative approach, managing our exposure outside of the industry, and prefer instead to maintain focus on fulfilling our commitments to the clients we serve.” Oregonian Media Group president John Maher confirms that years ago, Oregonian Media Group entered into a distribution agreement with The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and USA Today. “At that time, those services were complementary to our existing distribution operations and timing,” Maher wrote via email. “The ongoing coordination was complex as these printed products were produced by and for several different companies with different operational needs and requirements.” As a result, Oregonian Media Group stopped offering those services at the end of 2023, Maher says. He says this has allowed them to focus exclusively on distribution of The Oregonian, improving delivery in the process. But this move — and PCF’s unreliable delivery service — has left many Portland-based New York Times subscribers frustrated. Many of the people I spoke to for this story said they’d given up in exasperation and cancelled their Times subscription, hastening a trend that newspapers should be working hard to reverse. It’s no secret that newspaper circulation in the U.S. has been steadily falling since the mid-2000s. According to the Pew Research Center, weekday print circulation at U.S. newspapers decreased 13% from 2021 to 2022, the last two years for which figures are available. Because of that dramatic decline in print readership, many newspaper publishers are reducing investment in the physical paper, says Damian Radcliffe, a professor at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication. “When you look at the economics of newspapers, the physical printing and delivery are a huge cost,” Radcliffe says. In many cases, he says, they comprise anywhere from one-third to 40% of the total costs of putting together a paper. “Once you start to In recent months, Portland-based print readers have noticed sporadic delivery of The New York Times. What’s behind the delivery gap — and what does that say about the state of print media? 35
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