This is the last Sunday visit you will have from the Peninsula Daily News.
Thank you for welcoming us into your homes each Sunday for so many years.
It has been a pleasure to provide you with news, sports, opinion, comics and a variety of special column and other features in a Sunday weekend package.
We hope you have enjoyed it as much as we have.
We won’t be showing up on Sundays anymore. But our weekend visits aren’t over; just changed.
This coming weekend, we will come to visit on Saturday rather than Sunday. We plan to have the same package you have found in your Sunday weekend paper — with some slight changes, such as an address box on the front page — but it will be a day earlier than you have come to expect it.
This is a new adventure for all of us.
We have a system worked out with the U.S. Postal Service through its special dispatch for periodicals that is intended to get you your newspaper the same day it is dated.
Carriers will no longer be traveling down dark, sometimes icy, roads to bring you a newspaper but we will have employees out in the early-morning hours delivering papers from the press to four post office drop-offs on the Peninsula. Getting the papers early enough allows the postal service to provide same-day delivery.
We’ve told you why we’re making this mammoth change.
Times have changed.
Oh, we have carriers who are extremely dependable and at times even heroic. Theses are people proud of their work and proud of commitment to their customers and we have treasured them.
But these days there are too few people who want to work odd hours in the dark and cold to earn a little money. We can’t blame them, but we also had to find another way.
We have to change with the times.
A lot of us work hard every day to put a newspaper together. That means nothing if it isn’t read, if we can’t get it to you.
It’s been disheartening that for so many months we have been unable to honor our commitment to all of our readers.
We are moving to mail delivery to make delivery work better.
This change isn’t easy. Not for us. Not for you. But the goal is that you get a daily newspaper — at least on six days a week — and that we get back to focusing primarily on our business of reporting the news and helping retailers sell their goods, of caring for our communities. We all want to get back to normal.
We’ll miss not being at your homes on Sundays.
But it would be worse to not be there at all.
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Executive Editor Leah Leach can be reached at 360-417-3530 or at lleach@peninsuladailynews.com.