A first-class paper

A special message to our readers:

For more than 80 years, the People’s Weekly World and its predecessors, including the Daily Worker and the Daily World, have been delivering first-class coverage of news important to working people but ignored by the corporate media.

We covered, and advocated for, the huge gains and victories of the “first class” — workers — that we champion. We covered, and were part of, the fight to build the CIO in the 1930s; we did the same with the desegregation of baseball in the 1940s. From the unemployed councils of the 1930s, to the battles for civil rights in the 1960s, to the peace movement against the Korean, Vietnam and Iraq wars to the battle against the ultra-right — we were there. And today, as we enter a new period marked by both crisis and opportunity, we will continue to fulfill this indispensable role.

But while we’ve continued to be a first-class news source in print (and now every day online), the post office has not kept up. Postal workers continue to do their best to get the mail delivered promptly. But the cutbacks, privatization and consolidation in public services like the post office that have been pushed by the right wing (and reported on in these pages) have seriously reduced our ability to get our print edition into people’s hands using the “periodicals rate” (second-class mail). This is why so many of our readers have experienced service disruptions over the past few months.

We’ve decided that, to better serve our readers, the shipping class must match the stature of the paper.

We’ve experimented with a pilot program in which we sent the PWW first class to subscribers in four areas (New York, some of New England, Ohio, and a part of California) over the past few issues. In all those areas, people started to receive the paper on time, that is, within the dates covered by each issue.

So, from now on, we will be mailing every paper in the United States first class.

While we are using a mailing service that pre-sorts the papers to secure us discounts, getting the paper to you on time via first-class mail still means a substantial additional cost, and that means we have no choice but to raise the subscription price by a modest amount.

The new rates, for new subscriptions and renewals, are:

$24.95 for six months

$39.95 for one year

$49.95 for a solidarity pack (two papers each week).

Rates for Canada/Mexico and other foreign countries, as well as the institutional rate, will stay the same.

The new rates will go into

effect immediately. Of course your current subscription will continue as is.

While we are sorry about the increase, we also want to offer our readers (whom we value above all else — this is why we are moving to first class, in order to serve you better!) greater flexibility in payment. You can’t pay $39.95 for a year? Now you can pay for half a year at $24.95. Then, if you’re sure you want to get the paper for a full year, and want to take advantage of the $15 savings that a yearly rate will give you, just pay $5 per month until the year’s subscription is paid for.

Our staff and volunteers are confident that this is the best possible move given the difficult financial circumstances as well as the necessity of getting the paper to our readers in the timely fashion that you count on and deserve. We are very pleased to have finally solved this difficult problem, and we believe you will be too.

— Dan Margolis