I may be jinxing the relatively muted reaction to the news that, starting this month, the Enterprise-Journal will be printed only two days per week. But so far, the responses have been ... not hateful.
It could have been a lot worse. Honestly, I anticipated more calls this week from longtime print subscribers. I told the office to put any hostile calls through to me.
Those may come in the next few days or weeks. But for now, this change is not causing nearly the objections that the switch to mail delivery did in 2018.
This does not mean I like or welcome what starts this week. The time has flown by, but last week — Monday, May 26 — was the 42nd anniversary of my first day at the newspaper.
I was 21 years old, fresh out of college. We had a strong, six-days-a-week paper. I didn’t see anything about today’s media environment coming until a few years ago, when it was obvious that younger readers preferred online news to print.
At no time did I set a goal of, one day, whacking the hometown newspaper down to twice a week. Change just happened, like it has to so many businesses in recent years.
Where’s Fred’s, Sears and JC Penney’s? How is it that Rite Aid, a national drugstore chain, has filed for bankruptcy protection when the prescription drug business is booming? Newspapers were not immune to similar forces.
I wish I could report that we have every detail of this change set in stone. Nope — many things will be hashed out on the fly. But a lot of experienced people work here. We’ve got each other’s backs.
A few items on my mind:
• The two papers usually will have more pages. This coming Wednesday's will be 14 pages. Before, that edition would have been 8 or 10 pages.
• Many of you have done the math and realize that the number of papers per week is going down by 60%, from five to two; but the subscription price is only going down by 20%, from $15 a month to $12. This difference is mostly because printing and mail costs have become so high. Subscription prices did not increase in recent years to cover the rising costs.
• Our software will extend existing subscriptions to account for the reduced publication schedule. Even so, this may lead to a silent protest of not renewing subscriptions when they expire. That happened in 2018 when we switched to mail delivery.
• If price is the issue, then hopefully some print subscribers will be willing to give our website a try. It’s less expensive than the newspaper, and you will get local news much more quickly than you would with only the print edition.
• Two staples of the newspaper that will see great changes are sports and obituaries. This is unavoidable.
Sports: Games on the weekend won’t get into print till Wednesday, so we’ve got to rethink what we print about them. Local sports stories will go on the website right away — another reason to check us out online. But some stories, especially those of games, will be very old by the next print edition.
Same thing with obituaries. We will post death notices each weekday evening on the website. Then we will run several days worth of obits in the next print edition.
Next Wednesday’s paper, for example, will include obituaries from the weekend, Monday and Tuesday.
• Single copies of the paper, typically sold at convenience stores, will be $1.50 on both Wednesdays and Saturdays. This is an increase of 50 cents on Wednesday. The Saturday price remains the same.
Something else is on my mind, not related to the printing cutback, but this is a good place to mention it: our reports of local crime.
I promised a few weeks ago to get with the Pike County Sheriff’s Office to start looking at incident reports, which are public records. Chief Deputy Damian Gatlin has been working with me on this. I’m very grateful for his help.
Back to the twice-a-week adventure. There will be a lot of tweaks to issues that won’t present themselves until we start our new schedule this coming week.
I wish I was a hyper-planner, but I am more of a George H.W. Bush guy. In an interview before he took office in 1989, he got criticized for saying “I’ll handle whatever comes up” instead of presenting some grand vision.
I completely understand what Bush meant. I have been living it for the past several years, probably ever since I became editor 24 years ago.
I know some of you will be unhappy with the cutbacks and will drop the paper. I understand. We will still be friends. (But try the website. Don’t forget the website.)
We either respond to the market, or eventually we won’t be here. 42 years is too long for me to bail out now.
The McComb area needs an independent news gatherer. The Enterprise-Journal, whether in print or online, is not going down on my watch.
