One of the moments I’ve been proudest to work at The Alpena News happened my first or second winter here, when a polar vortex clobbered our community with frigid temperatures and heavy snow.

The U.S. Postal Service announced it would not deliver the mail because of the dangerous weather.

Your Alpena News carriers still delivered your newspaper.

Our carriers do a fantastic job and play an important role in our community, helping us stay informed by making sure our newspaper arrives on our doorstep before we pour our first cup of coffee, so we can start our day knowing what’s going on around our neighborhoods.

Most of our carriers deliver dozens or even hundreds of newspapers every night before you wake up.

But, like many other positions in many other industries, it’s become harder and harder to find people willing to perform that important work. We’ve struggled to hire new carriers and our carriers have struggled to find substitutes to take over their routes when they get sick, their car breaks down, or they take a much-deserved vacation.

When our job postings for carriers go unanswered, I and Circulation Director Ken Pokorzynski do all we can to make sure your newspaper still arrives.

Our first option always is to look to our existing carrier force to see if any carriers with routes nearby want to take over the vacant route. But, as we’ve repeatedly used that option over the years, many of our carriers are unable to handle any more workload.

If we can’t find another carrier, we then turn to the U.S. Postal Service for delivery. Through the post office, your postal carrier delivers your paper to your mailbox the same day the paper is published, though it arrives with your mail and may not arrive first thing in the morning.

Whenever and however your printed paper arrives — or on the rare occasion it doesn’t arrive because your carrier is off sick or his or her car broke down — you can always access all content from The Alpena News online, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, through the following options:

∫ TheAlpenaNews.com: All local news stories published in the printed paper also are published on our website, often with additional content such as photo galleries, videos, interactive graphics, and embedded documents. We also publish breaking news to our website as it happens, keeping you informed with up-to-the-minute coverage of the most important news of the day.

If you have a subscription to The News, you have full access to our website at no additional charge and can get started by clicking the “login” button near the top of the page at TheAlpenaNews.com.

∫ All-Access: Every day, we reproduce our printed paper as an interactive PDF and make that PDF available through our All-Access platform, which can be accessed at the bottom of the first page at TheAlpenaNews.com or through our All-Access app on your smartphone. All-Access allows you to flip through the pages of the paper just as you would the printed product and click on highlighted headlines to pull up easy-to-read versions of every story.

Through the All-Access app, you can also play digital versions of our daily crossword puzzles and sudoku.

If you have a subscription to The Alpena News, you can log in to All-Access to get full use of its features at no additional charge.

∫ Our digital newsletters: Visit thealpenanews.com/newsletter-sign-up to receive our headlines and/or breaking news email newsletters and have links to each day’s top stories and any breaking news alerts sent directly to your email inbox.

If you subscribe to The News, you can read all those stories without any additional charge.

If you are not a subscriber, sign up today at TheAlpenaNews.com/subscribe to receive either the printed paper and full access to TheAlpenaNews.com and the All-Access edition or sign up for a digital-only subscription to receive full online access but no printed paper.

The News works hard every day to make sure you can access the important information you need to make decisions about how you want to interact with your community, either by newspaper carrier, the U.S. Post Office, or through TheAlpenaNews.com.

We’ll continue to do so.

In the meantime, if you’re interested in earning some extra cash and playing an important role in that mission, consider becoming a carrier. Call us at 989-354-3111.

And, please, tip your carriers.

You can do so with your subscription renewal or, for customers on our EasyPay plan who don’t receive renewal notices, you can tip your carrier by stopping by The News offices at 130 Park Place in downtown Alpena or by calling us at 989-354-3111.

Justin A. Hinkley can be reached at 989-354-3112 or jhinkley@thealpenanews.com. Follow him on Twitter @JustinHinkley.