The puzzles and comics that currently run in the Monday edition will appear in the Tuesday paper instead.
By now, you have probably seen our notices that we are discontinuing our Monday print edition next month. I will be honest here: We are doing this to save money, and dropping one day of printing and home delivery is one of the least-worse choices.
Like most if not all U.S. newspapers, we have been looking at cost-reduction plans for several months. As you have heard many times, our advertisers are caught in the same rush to the internet that newspapers have been experiencing for years. Because advertising traditionally generated the majority of our income, we, like our industry, need to adjust our costs as our advertising revenue shrinks.
That’s why you see newspapers both large and small cutting home delivery days and reducing page counts. In fact, we have been printing more pages and sections most days than any other Northwest newspapers I have seen recently. In our size category, which includes papers like Everett and Salem, Ore., you will see two-section papers most days.
We aren’t planning to reduce page counts, but we will eliminate some jobs and trim other costs. Some of these things, such as changing the advertising insert schedule, will be invisible to most customers.
We talked about all of this, and some other options, before landing on the decision to drop Mondays. From an advertising perspective, it makes sense: Mondays are not popular with advertisers, who prefer slots on or near the weekend. And it also makes sense from the news perspective: Most of the local content in our Monday paper is written on Fridays, if not earlier. Why should we hold it?
Of course, we will still offer breaking news on our website every day of the week. If you are a print subscriber, you have unlimited access to our digital products. Visit www.columbian.com/digital and www.columbian.com/ePaper to set up your accounts.
From a faithful print reader’s perspective, though, Monday will be a loss. So our newsroom managers, led by News Editor Merridee Hanson, have come up with a plan to preserve the regular features now found on Mondays.
Here are some of the highlights:
• Monday comics, puzzles and Aces on Bridge will be printed on Tuesdays, along with extra sports news. We’ll add two pages to the Tuesday Life and Sports sections to accommodate this content.
• The Monday TV grid will appear on Sundays.
• Roll Call Report, which lists how our delegation voted in Washington, D.C., the previous week, will appear on Saturdays when Congress is in session.
• Working in Clark County will usually appear on Saturdays. We reserve the right to save it for another day if too much business news happens on any given Friday. The business calendar and People in Business will move to Sundays.
• Our weekly Health cover moves to Tuesdays. Frankly, I am excited about this change, because Tuesday is our Newspapers in Education day. Teachers will find this content to be more useful than our At Home section about decorating and gardening.
• At Home moves to Saturdays. Saturday mornings, before you hit the garden center or hardware store, seem like a good fit for these stories.
• Saturday’s Community section content will be split among several days, with some of the content appearing in Metro and the rest in Life. The contributed neighborhood news — what we like to call “truckies”– will appear on Fridays.
There are a bunch of smaller changes, too. You’ll want to look carefully for the first week or two to find all of your former Monday favorites.
Although I wish we weren’t making these changes, it’s important to keep The Columbian operating on a sustainable footing. We have been bringing you the news of Clark County for 128 years, and we will continue to do so.
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