Many of the Boston Globe reporters who showed up at a distribution center in Newton Saturday night were surprised to discover that having a paper route means more than just delivering the newspaper: First you have to put all the sections together, and put them in a plastic bag.
“You’ve seen what a newspaper looks like on the newsstand,” a staffer from the Globe’s distribution subcontractor told the Globe staffers. “It should look like that when you’re finished with it, OK? Good enough? Any questions, guys?”
The Globe has been struggling to deliver its print edition since switching to a new distributor last week. As many as 200 Globe staffers volunteered to stay up into the wee hours of Sunday morning to make sure subscribers woke up with their Sunday print edition. Investigative reporter Beth Healy says if they hadn’t, the paper probably wouldn’t have been delivered—again.
“You know, the Boston Globe is a big part of a lot of people’s lives,” Healy said. “And we’ve all been hearing from our readers and our neighbors. And it would be one thing if it was one day. But it’s been almost a week for people.”
The Globe’s switch to a new distributor went disastrously wrong. Technology reporter Hiawatha Bray says he thought the paper’s phones were broken last week when he couldn’t make an outgoing call.
“So many readers were calling in to complain that we couldn’t even get outside lines ourselves,” he said. “It was terrible.”
The new distributor, ACI Media, couldn’t get enough people to deliver the papers. John Riley, who runs the Newton operation as owner of ACI Media subcontractor Sheffield Cartage Company, says a big part of the problem was that the Globe decided to switch companies on December 28th before the old company, PCF, had distributed year-end tips to carriers.
“As a result, many carriers, instead of risking whether they would get their tip or not, decided they would just stay with PCF until January 1,” he said.
Riley’s hopeful that now in the new year more of the carriers will move over to his company and the other ACI Media contractors delivering the Globe, but it may be tough to find enough people willing to get up early to deliver papers.
“Once there was one distributing company in the Boston area,” he said. “Now there’s two. And we’re both competing for the same carriers.”
A statement from the Globe called the service disruptions frustrating, and blamed the complex job of deploying a new staff that’s unfamiliar with the routes. But that doesn’t begin to describe how unfamiliar the delivery team was early Sunday morning.
“I did this in college and I did it as a kid as a paper girl,” said Janice Page, deputy managing editor for features, among the Globe staffers picking up a route. “So I can do it again, right? A few decades later, it’s still the same job.”
Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Sacha Pfeiffer also chipped in.
“I think everybody in this room really loves this newspaper,” she said. “And something very wrong happened this week with delivery. It was not the reporters that made that mistake. And I think it kind of breaks the reporters’ hearts to see people not getting their papers and being upset about it, and us being very fearful that they will cancel.”
As he gets ready to head out for deliveries, reporter Hiawatha Bray counts to make sure he has enough papers for his route. He and Healy load up an SUV with papers, and head out to a pitch-black, tree-lined neighborhood where they strain to see the address numbers in the darkness. The two reporters jumped out of the car and pulled out their cell phones for light.
As he finds the right house and drops a thick newspaper on a subscriber’s front step, Bray, the technology reporter, says the paper edition, this artifact of a pre-Internet age, is still relevant.
“It’s still a physical world at the end of the day,” he said. “Not everything is electronic. Some things still leave ink stains on your hands, and those things have to be delivered by human beings. Some of whom, you know, have to sometimes drag themselves out of bed and say, ‘This isn’t my job, but we don’t care. We’re doing it anyway.’”
