The news coming out that CTT increased profits by 66% does not surprise me, given my geographical location. As a journalist, in recent years I have followed the closure of many post offices in the interior of the country, in addition to the fact that those that still exist now have few human resources, both in customer service and in distribution, which does not happen daily.
Therefore, the profits obtained do not seem to me to be the result of a genius strategy, in fact, the results hide other realities. In some locations, correspondence remains on the back burner, particularly affecting the regional press. Anyone who runs a local newspaper knows that, currently, this is one of the problems affecting the sector: the delay in delivering the publication to the subscriber. For newspapers that are not daily or weekly, the delivery period for periodical publications is three working days. When a newspaper comes out on a Friday, it is often only delivered on the following Wednesday or even later, making the product, when it reaches the reader, completely superfluous. The newspaper is dependent on the temporality of events and when it is distributed many days later, it encourages readers to cut their subscription, contributing to the worsening of the crisis in a sector already in decline.
It should be noted that selling paper newspapers still makes perfect sense, especially in areas where the Internet signal is weak or non-existent, or even for sections of the population that do not have sufficient digital literacy to access online subscriptions, with the prevailing choose the paper edition.
Several entities have already warned about this problem, which since the privatization of CTT has become more prominent. The Christian Inspiration Press Association, on several occasions, has accused CTT of providing a “bad service”. And the Portuguese Press Association (API), recently, in a debate organized in Gouveia, called ‘News Deserts. Deserts of Freedom?’, admitted, through the voice of its president, Cláudia Maia, that it is “a dramatic situation that poses serious problems for the sector”. The API president recalled that the problem arose in 2016, “when quality indicators [da distribuição] they started to be very low”, in other words, “CTT has to comply with metrics, if they don’t comply, they have to compensate the injured parties”, concluded Cláudia Maia, noting that “CTT is killing the sector”.
The State seems to be alienated from this reality, despite successive complaints from directors and editors of the regional press, but perhaps it is time to try to find a solution to the fact that, in many regional newspapers, subscribers further away from large cities , receive the newspaper first than subscribers who live in the land where the newspaper is based.
Also on a private basis, the perception when sending orders and letters is that if they are not registered with acknowledgment of receipt, the risk of them not being delivered is very high and is confirmed, in fact, obliging the customer, after some unpleasant situations, having to pay high amounts for registered mail, with acknowledgment of receipt, if you want the Easter gift, sent to your goddaughter in Lisbon, to actually reach its destination.
The author writes according to the 1990 Orthographic Agreement
