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NNA: U.S.P.S. Fails to Make Case for Rate Hike

Officials of the National Newspaper Association testified before the Postal Rate Commission yesterday, claiming that the U.S. Postal Service’s proposed postage increase of 25-30 percent for the class of mail most used by newspapers would make delivery less efficient.

Max Health, chairman of the NNA’s postal committee, said that the rate hikes would penalize publishers who are making the Postal Service’s job easier by pre-sorting, drop-shipping, bar-coding and documenting their mail with Postal Service-approved software, according to Editor & Publisher. An economist said, on behalf of the NNA, that the U.S.P.S. had failed to make its case that the cost of handling newspapers has dramatically increased.

NNA President Jerry Reppert, publisher of the Gazette-Democrat, Anna, IL, says he believes that “we are well on our way to bringing this cost back under some reasonable range of increase, and that we will be able to help the Postal Service to find a better way to measure our true costs.”