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If you are one of our many, many subscribers I would like to thank you.  If you are one of the hundreds of people who pick up the paper at the store, I would like to thank you too.  As you would imagine, newspapers (while some will tell you is a dying dinosaur) are thriving. Before you blow milk out your nose from laughing so hard, I would like to clarify what I mean.  While the paper industry may be flailing a bit, there is one thing that our measly little paper offers that others do not.  On what TV station or where on the internet can you read about local politics?  I mean really local.  Where on social media can you read about the local sports teams and how they are doing?  Where anywhere can you get local news, news that we bring you each and every week?  The answer is nowhere.  While papers such as the big city papers that employ hundreds of employees may in fact be struggling, we have the privilege to bring you the most indepth local news around.  Do we occasionally miss a story here or there? Of course, not intentionally mind you.  But we try our very hardest to make this the best little newspaper in the state.  

To all of our subscribers, readers and advertisers - we say thank you.  Quite simply, without all of you, we cease to exist.  You ARE our reason for existence.  We appreciate each and every one of you - thank you!  Which brings me to my next point.  Apparently there is a growing group of subscribers who are failing to get their papers in a timely manner and in some cases horribly late.  I think I will begin by letting you all know our ritual for getting the paper out each week.  On Wednesdays, bright and early, we go over the paper layout one last time to make sure we have it all done correctly.  The paper then gets sent to the printer who completes it usually around 2 p.m.  It then is loaded on a truck and brought back here to Lindstrom.  From here we take it to the Lindstrom Post Office.  The bags (broken into cities and towns) then are separated and Center City, Shafer and Taylors Falls are delivered that afternoon to those post offices.   Wyoming, Forest Lake, North Branch and Stacy head to St. Paul to the USPS headquarters where they are supposed to board another truck and head back to those towns Thursday. As many of you who live in the towns where the truck goes to St. Paul first know, these are our troubled readers who are getting short shriffed and getting their papers late.  Apparently there is no urgency to deliver mail anymore. Please do not get me wrong, I love our local post offices and the people who work there. But the downtown post office has got some major issues right now.  I had a reader tell me just this week that she had just gotten a first class letter post marked November 16th.  

Which is where our dilemma is as well. We are at the mercy of the post office in St. Paul and lately we have been at the back of the line, behind Amazon and junk mail. For that I apologize.  People pay good money and expect the paper to be on time and they should expect that.  So I am here to tell you that my schedule on Wednesdays has changed - possibly forever.  I am now going to bring all of the bags to those cities and skip the truck going to St.Paul.  What does that mean for readers who have been getting papers late or no papers at all? It means that you should have your papers earlier than you have ever had them.  Not what I had planned for my Wednesday afternoons, but this is serious. You are the world to us and we want you to be happy.

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