When students thanked Kostadin Smoukov for delivering The Daily Northwestern to the newsstands on campus, he was confused by their gratitude. “It’s my job,” he would respond.
The newspaper delivery driver, 80, started the job in September 1998 and retired this May after 27 years.
After a travel restriction was lifted in Bulgaria, his home country, Smoukov and his wife began taking international trips. Eventually, they decided to immigrate to the United States.
“This was our opportunity to see the world,” Smoukov said.
He started delivering The Daily to earn money for himself and his family.
Smoukov’s distribution days would begin around 7 a.m. when he would drive 30 minutes to pick the papers up from the printing press, Topweb, in Northwest Chicago. Then, he would drive 30 minutes back to Evanston, and begin the route. The 58-stop route would take around four hours.
The delivery of The Daily has changed over the years as the newspaper went from printing every weekday to just Wednesdays. When Smoukov started, The Daily printed around 8,000 newspapers each round, he said. Now, they print just 3,000. The slowing of the publication hasn’t been a problem for Smoukov, who was getting older by the time they slowed down the frequency of publication.
“I used [delivery] for fitness,” he said. “Because I am older, I had to do something to continue to be physically [strong].”
The Daily’s readership has moved to mostly online, and they get 250,000 to 350,000 page views per month. Ninety-four percent of Northwestern University reads The Daily in some form, according to the statistics from Student Publishing Company (SPC), which oversees The Daily.
Still, SPC makes it a point for the students to have the opportunity to print, said Stacia Campbell, the company’s general manager.
“There’s something very satisfying in spending a lot of your time on a story and seeing it in print,” Campbell said.
SPC Shop Manager and backup delivery driver Chris Widman said that the purpose of a print paper now is to just provide larger updates on stories.
“The news coming out in the print paper is in a digest form,” he said. “[Breaking news] stories will have been published on the internet or the email digest or the social media at that point. Still, it’s a nice way for people to read over lunch.”
Now that Smoukov is retired, SPC is considering distribution options for Fall Quarter, when The Daily resumes printing. They haven’t formed a concrete plan yet.
“We’re hoping to find a service of some sort that we can contract with,” Campbell said. “Part of the problem is we only publish 29 times a year.”
Another difficulty of using a delivery service is that there is no guarantee of getting the same driver every time. Delivery drivers’ access to buildings might be limited as the University may not want to give keys to a whole company.
“Ultimately, our backup plan is that my coworker will have to do it, but we are not prepared for him to be out of the office one day a week taking care of circulation,” Campbell said.
As The Daily works to fill Smoukov’s absence, he’s planning how to fill the time he won’t be spending distributing. His goal for retirement is to travel to landmarks around the United States.
“I’m sure it is impossible to see everything, but I’ll try,” he said.
