Changing times: Postal rates once a great support for periodicals in U.S.

The Founding Fathers of the United States believed that for a democracy to succeed, its citizens needed to have access to information; through postal subsidies, the young republic supported newspapers and magazines as a good way to spread that information. Postal policies have moved away from that supporting role since 1970. The influence of the Internet has affected both the USPS and the print media industry since about 2000, as the chart below shows.