Never failing to raise a smile for me is a line that regularly is appended to letters, emails or text messages I receive. The notes can be comments about our stories, criticisms or complaints about delivery, but the last sentence says something like, “I delivered The Plain Dealer when I was a kid.”
It’s the writer’s way of saying they have a connection greater than consuming news on our platforms. They were part of the organization once.
This is a column about our evolving ways of delivering the news to you, but that nostalgic notion of children being the agents of delivery is what makes me smile regularly. When I was 12, I was one of those kids, delivering the Philadelphia Inquirer in southern New Jersey.
The idea of a major American business relying on networks of pre-teen children to be their physical link to customers seems unimaginable today, but once upon a time, newspaper delivery trucks fanned out across America every morning and afternoon to drop their bundles at the homes of thousands of children, who then loaded them into bicycle baskets to drop on doorsteps.
We did it in all weather. When it snowed, I hauled mine on a sled each morning. When it rained, I got drenched. And every couple of weeks, I had to go out on a few afternoons to knock on doors to get people to pay me.
I think newspaper delivery kids learned a good bit about human nature in handling their routes. Some customers were always grumpy. Others were unfailingly friendly, wanting to chat about what was interesting in the life of a 12-year old. Some tipped. Some didn’t. Some avoided answering the door for weeks at a time.
One customer had a vicious dog that had a code word to call off attacks. The customer told me the code word, but when the dog came after me one morning, I forgot it. I just learned to pedal faster.
The customer I remember best was a guy who called me every two or three weeks, on Sundays, to say his paper was missing its Two Guys ad. Two Guys was a department store. One day as I pedaled past his car, I saw a dashboard clip stuffed with coupons from those ads. I was furious when he called, because I knew he was lying, but 12-year-old boys back then did not call grown people liars. I hopped back on my bike to take him another ad. Finally one Sunday, I pulled the ad out of the paper when I delivered it and taped it to the window of his storm door. He never called about missing the ad again. I regret it now, because I suspect his collecting of Two Guys coupons was some form of mental illness. I probably made him feel terrible.
While having children as the link between the business and the customer seems unwieldy, it worked for decades. If someone’s paper was damaged, they didn’t have to phone a call center for help. They called the 12-year-old kid, who quickly solved the problem.
I don’t think parents today would be comfortable allowing their 12-year-old children to go knocking on doors alone like we did then, and eventually, the newspaper industry turned to adults to deliver the papers. Using cars, delivery agents would cover much more ground than a kid could on a bike, enough to make a living.
Sadly, even the era of adult agents is proving to be a challenge. Because of today’s job market, we’re having a harder time finding people to deliver the printed edition of The Plain Dealer. The bigger the distance between you and Cleveland, the higher the likelihood that we don’t have a delivery agent.
Rest assured that we do have a team dedicated to getting you your copy of The Plain Dealer. And when problems arise, they work diligently to solve them.
But I do think we have better ways of delivering you the news. My wife and I have been reading the digital replica of the newspaper, instead of the printed edition, for more than a decade. It’s so much easier to navigate. We can expand the text easily. We can read it at the same time. I hear from people all the time who just want the paper copy, but more and more have learned to embrace the digital copy.
I think our podcasts are another strong way of delivering our news. Our sports podcasts are terrific discussions, filled with insights, into the headlines of the day, as is Today in Ohio, our news podcast discussion. you can find them at cleveland.com/podcasts.
Our newsletters, delivered to your email box, contain many of our headlines, with links to full stories on cleveland.com from the previous 24 hours. Subscribers have full access to the stories on the website. The newsletters are a powerful delivery tool. You can sign up at cleveland.com/newsletters.
One of the reasons people like The Plain Dealer in paper or digital form is it is curated to contain the biggest and most interesting stories available. I believe the demand for that kind of news product will last far beyond the days of a printed newspaper, and I suspect the digital replica of The Plain Dealer will continue evolving to meet that demand.
It would have been unfathomable back when I was 12 to think that a newspaper would one day be transmitted over fiber optic cables to be read on hand-held video screens. Almost as unfathomable as it would be for today’s 12-year-old children to think that giant businesses once built fortunes relying on them as their direct link to customers.
Thanks for reading.
