The Mail Carriers Will Deliver the Pensions, But Not the Newspapers. The representatives of several periodicals demand solutions to this situation

The acting Director-General of Posta Moldovei, Vitalie Zaharia, invoked the special working regime introduced by the institution in order to protect the employees during the state of emergency and stated that post offices would provide ‘only emergency services’.

As a reply, journalists said they could not print newspapers and magazines because the distributors would not deliver them to readers and subscribers. In an appeal signed by representatives of several publications, and by the Association of Independent Press (API), the journalists expressed their regret over that situation and said they would inform the public only online, through portals and websites, until Posta Moldovei resumes the delivery of printed publications.

The signatories asked the authorities of the Republic of Moldova ‘to be clear about the period of the delivery downtime and to find ways to resume it as soon as possible, and to make it safe for the mail carriers and for the beneficiaries of post services’. The appeal also says: ‘We’d like to make the authorities aware that while publications are not being printed, the extent to which a great part of the population is informed, including hundreds of thousands of people who live in rural areas, is curtailed, and that this would lead to the total or partial suspension of economic activity of editorial offices and of certain businesses in the printing industry’.

Newsstands also stopped working in the Republic of Moldova because of the spread-out of the Covid-19 epidemic.

Photo source: Liliana Croitor