It’s early morning and The Highway Printers’ entrance in New Germany is a hive of activity, with distribution company CND’s trucks rolling in to collect the bundles of Caxton Local Media’s newspapers for distribution.
Distribution runners appear, seemingly from nowhere, to load the heavy bundles, while supervisors with clipboards and drivers check the quantities.
While most folks know the newspaper cycle from collecting news and selling adverts to layout, production and finally the printing works, the actual delivery of the newspaper – and its challenges – to your post box, is not so well known.
A total of 221 325 newspapers are delivered door-to-door to homes and businesses in the eight areas of distribution every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, with up to eight trucks being used every day.
Each truck has a driver, an allocator and 10 runners. In addition to the allocated trucks, a balance truck roams the area with extra newspaper bundles, leaving these in designated areas for the trucks to collect. There are also three controllers driving around checking on the runners and drivers.
The delivery trucks go into their designated areas and drop off bundles and runners. The distribution runners are identified by their yellow vests.
Each runner can only carry about 25 papers depending on weight (anything from 12g up to 23g per newspaper), so the truck drops off bundles of about 25 newspapers on corners for each runner to refill their bag as they go along the street and ensure continuous distribution.
These bundles of newspapers are often mistaken to have been dumped, however, they have been left there for runners to collect.
When a runner has done his allocated number of roads, he is collected by the truck and dropped in the next section of houses.
Once the truck driver has off-loaded his first batch of newspapers and the runners, he goes to the drop-off point to collect the next load.
He then loads up, returns to pick up his runners and drops off the next load of papers.
Bundles awaiting distribution
Drivers get remonstrated for dropping off the bundles at street corners, as residents seem to think this bundle is simply being dumped.
As explained, this is necessary due to the volume and weight of the papers and bundles will always be collected.
However, if a bundle is seen on the day after distribution then we would appreciate being informed.
If rain is predicted, then the newspapers are placed in plastic bags, but sometimes the weatherman has not got it right and the distributors get blamed for wet newspapers.
Some of the issues experienced are that the slots on post boxes are too small to accommodate the newspaper, and if they try to squeeze it in, the plastic postbox may crack. A 50mm round tube fitted on the fence next to the post box is recommended.
It must be stressed that one of the delivery rules is that if there is no post box or tube visible, there will be no delivery of the paper. Runners and drivers are prohibited from inserting papers into gates or fences or throwing the paper into the yards.
Sometimes readers complain they have not received their newspaper. It could be a passer-by who has nicked it out of the post box. This is most prevalent in busy thoroughfares.
The homes that have granny flats should fit two tubes which will be an indication to the runners and drivers that two copies of the newspaper are required. In addition to the door-to-door household delivery, local businesses receive their copies.
Bulk drops of newspapers are also delivered to key venues such as libraries, supermarkets, shopping centres, garages, post offices and so on. These bulk drops are for the public to collect if they do not live in the distribution footprint.
Note the delivery day of the South Coast Sun is on Thursday, between 9am and 4pm, and the newspaper is published four times a month. It’s not guaranteed that the newspaper is delivered at the same time every week, as the distribution department could encounter problems such as factory breakdowns, vehicle breakdowns, weather and so on.
Unfortunately, errors do happen and if you are not receiving your copy of your favourite newspaper or see an incident with the distribution team that you would like to bring to our attention, call our toll free distribution number 080-044-4466 or email distribution@dbn.caxton.co.za
Caxton Local Newspapers distribution is monitored and audited with each newspaper needing to be accounted for and allocated. Quarterly audits are performed by the Audit Bureau of Circulation which issues our Verified Free Distribution Certificate, this means that the distributors are not able to give out random papers as people ask for them and are only allowed to leave one paper per household.
