Herald begins morning delivery

MOSES LAKE — The first day of morning delivery for the Columbia Basin Herald went off without a hitch.

But it was a little nerve-racking.

“Where’s my truck?” asked CBH circulation director Sue Cant at a little after 6 a.m. “I’ve got people who need to get out of here at 6:15.”

The truck from Coeur d’Alene, Idaho arrived just a minute later, with papers and inserts and advertisements ready to go.

“A lot of customers I’ve talked to, they are a little on the fence about it,” said James Funderburgh, a CBH carrier. “They don’t know how it’s going to work yet.”

Funderburgh and his wife Annie deliver about 150 papers on a long route from Royal City up through George and into Quincy. And they need to start early.

“I was prepared for the worst case, but it was good,” said Cant after all the early carriers were stocked with papers and sent on their way.

Cant said that getting the CBH to morning delivery was a lengthy process that began last October and involved a lot of discussion and collaboration with the U.S. Postal Service and Columbia Basin Publishing’s parent company, The Hagadone Corporation, which also publishes the Coeur d’Alene Press, and prints the CBH — along with several other newspapers — in Coeur d’Alene.

“We did not want to change the editorial deadline,” Cant said.

Subscribers to the print edition living in rural areas will get their paper by mail on the same day they are published — a big help for the paper, since it has been difficult to find delivery drivers for some of the rural reaches of the county, Cant said.

The CBH currently has a little more than 1,000 miles of delivery routes in Grant and Adams counties, Cant added.

With same-day print editions now available in racks and at stores in and around Moses Lake by 8 a.m., Cant said the hope is that customers will get the news while it’s still fresh.

“We’re hoping it will increase home delivery and single copy sales,” she said.

According to Annemarie Hermann, a checker at Safeway in Moses Lake, the papers arrived at a little after 8 a.m., and one customer had already been in to buy it.

“I heard about this,” she said. “It kind of surprised me.”

Funderburgh said that while they have to get up earlier now, morning delivery means their work says will be over, rather than just starting, at noon. Which means that James and Annie will get to spend more time with their kids.

“It’s a challenge for us, actually,” Funderburgh said.

Charles H. Featherstone can be reached via email at countygvt@columbiabasinherald.com.