Industry group calls on Postal Service to slow down increases

The Postal Service should only be permitted to raise postage rates annually, the National Newspaper Association (NNA) told the Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC).

NNA is responding to a request by the PRC for comments on proposed new rules that would stop the semi-annual increases that publishers have seen most years since 2021.

Matthew Paxton IV, NNA’s senior delegate to the USPS Mailers Technical Advisory Committee, commented in a letter to the PRC that some NNA members had previously thought dividing USPS’s hefty price increases into two segments might help publishers to absorb the new costs. But, he said: “We have concluded that the disruptive effects of semi-annual increases outweigh whatever flexibility it provides our smaller members in absorbing the increases.”

He cited the costs of software updates, USPS’s own inability to keep its internal software in sync with new rates and the disruptive effects of higher prices in general as factors that lead NNA to support the PRC’s proposal to limit the increases to once a year. But, he warned, unless the scale of recent increases is tempered by PRC regulation, the impact upon newspapers will continue to be harmful.

Periodicals mail volume, which includes newspapers, has fallen by almost a third since the steep increases began in 2021. Slow delivery, combined with the higher rates, has pushed customers away from the postal system.

Paxton, publisher of The News-Gazette in Lexington, Virginia, was joined in his comments by NNA’s full postal delegation to the Postmaster General’s Mailers Technical Advisory Committee (MTAC): former NNA Chair John Galer, publisher of The Journal-News in Hillsboro (Illinois); Bradley Hill, CEO of Interlink, Berrien Springs, Michigan, a postal software supplier; and Lynne Lance, NNA executive director.