April 21, 2012 06:20 PM UTC

Service woes at the Denver Post

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• by: Awen

(Don’t bother to call   – promoted by Pita)

Effective January 31, 2012, if you are one of the dwindling few who still has a subscription to the increasingly right-wing Denver Post, and your carrier misses delivery, you won’t get a replacement paper.

My husband and I recently moved, and this morning, the paper wasn’t there.

So I did what I’ve been doing for more than 30 years – I called and asked for a re-delivery.

Sorry, no, says the alleged Customer Service department. That whole department has been laid off, and they do re-deliveries only on Sunday.

The options when you don’t get your paper? A day’s free online (most of the content is online anyway, except for the ads) or a credit. Big whoop. It’s a 25 cent credit, when it will cost 50 cents to buy it at the corner store.

I spent 13 years as a newspaper reporter, and learned early on that the front line of a newspaper is not just its reporters – it’s just as much the people who make sure the content shows up somewhere, either on your front porch or now, online.

We know the Post has done dramatic layoffs of reporting staff, from reporters to columnists, in recent months. That they no longer value the service of the people who make sure the content is in your hands in the morning is at least as worrying to me as the layoffs of reporters and columnists.