It’s no secret: the news industry is changing.

Earlier this month, the Columbus Dispatch announced its printing services would be moved to Indianapolis in March, which would amount to about 188 employees losing their jobs.

The move is attributed to the Dispatch’s parent company GateHouse Media’s merger with Gannett in late 2019, which allowed the consolidation of printing services with relatively close facilities.


Here in Athens, changes to the newspaper industry are also effecting the Messenger. As a locally-written and locally-printed county paper of record, we are committed to remaining Athens County’s source for hometown news. In conjunction with our dedication, we are listening to the requests of readers and moving our Sunday Messenger to now be delivered on Saturday morning. Because of this, we are introducing the new Athens Messenger: Weekend Edition for subscribers and readers in our region.

The Weekend Edition will be introduced on Feb. 1, 2020.

“This move gives us the ability to broaden our daily reach and provide better service for areas that we’ve had difficulty finding reliable carriers,” said Mark Shorts, director of distribution and audience development for APG Ohio.

Shorts explained that the papers will be delivered to local U.S. Postal Service Offices for USPS carriers to deliver them on their mail routes. Last summer, this same model was tried for Crescent News, an APG Ohio publication located in Defiance, Ohio, and it was found to be “very successful.”

“This will be same-day delivery,” Shorts said. “It will also help with our reliability of delivery.”


He said that some readers would be receiving their papers a little later in the day, but stressed that same-day delivery has been promised through this partnership. Each day’s news is published to the website by 5 a.m., allowing readers to start they day caught up on the local news of the day.

All print subscriptions include online access. Those who are experiencing difficulties logging on to athensmessenger.com should call the office at 740-592-6612.

The Messenger staff remains committed to providing reliable local and regional news each and every day for Southeastern Ohio residents, despite changes in the print news industry. We are committed to providing the news that matters to our readers and will continue to build on our award-winning reputation throughout the new decade.

In November, editor Tyler Buchanan took a new position reporting for the Ohio Capital Journal in Columbus, pushing staff reporter Heather Willard into the position of interim editor. Keep an eye out for an announcement of our new editor in the upcoming weeks.

To be honest, I find it hard to not have days of newspapers. Personally a fan of having one to read in the morning, even as a young kid, always enjoyed the sports section on the weekends.

Same here. I laid on the floor on the weekends and poured over every page of the sports section as a kid -- after my dad had read it first. ;)

Now, however, I sit on the couch in the morning, or at the kitchen counter, and read my "news" on my phone. I have considered that I should be reading a paper though, if only to get some actual news in my life, because I've quit watching the news on TV for the most part.

Outside the top ten markets I imagine there are few papers in the U.S. that publish seven days a week anymore. Practically everything's available and more up to date on the internet.

We dropped the print edition of the Dispatch entirely more than five years ago when they started charging more for a smaller paper. The strange part was their "five minute read" column where they summarized all the top stories in the paper. They had a "five minute read" for a paper that takes only ten or 15 minutes to read front to back.

Gannett's takeover of Gatehouse means that Ohio's largest cities will soon be without any paper of substance. The Gannett-owned Cincy Enquirer is just a shell of its former self. The Dispatch and the Akron Beacon-Journal will soon follow. The Plain Dealer is mostly show-biz news and sports. The Dayton Daily News is declining. The Toledo Blade may be the best paper in the state.

Same here and probably for a lot of people who grew up before the internet. I didn't have cable either so it really was my only source of sports information other than the local news. It's basically what inspired me to be a journalist.

Unfortunately, things have changed. My paper was looking at doing delivering via the post office, but it would be a huge change for us because we're an afternoon paper Monday through Friday with Saturday the only morning edition. There's never been a Sunday edition (at least not for many decades). We put the paper together early in the morning, rather than at night. The idea of post office delivery has been put off for now. It would have helped in a couple of ways. It's a lot cheaper doing it that way rather than paying carriers, and also the carriers are terribly unreliable. So far, we haven't made any major changes. We no longer print a paper on Martin Luther King Jr. Day., Presidents Day, Columbus Day or Veterans Day but put out online editions. We've always had no paper on Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's Day. It's been discussed eliminating printing another day during the week (probably Thursday or Friday) but no move on that either.

Lets see how this works. Weekend paper has to be at the post office for local delivery by 6AM. 3 - 4 hour travel time depending on post office. 3 hour print time. ? hour page setting time. So - Looks like a 6PM deadline Friday night. Add to that we have had no paper on Monday for several years. Bottom line if you just do the print version, no weekend sports news till Tuesday. :-(

I think the "telling" line in the post is this.

" Each day’s news is published to the website by 5 a.m., allowing readers to start they day caught up on the local news of the day."

In 5 years we will be buying a subscription to the "web site". And the print version will go away as it will be stale / old news by the time you get it.

Did the Mess ever really have a Sunday paper? I seem to recall it being delivered by 2 p.m. on Saturday. Am I wrong?

Shifted to a real Sunday paper a few years ago and stopped the Monday paper.

I've always enjoyed reading the newspaper. I can always use my phone to look something up, but really enjoy the paper. When I bought my first house, the first thing I did was order the local paper. For a while I had 2 papers delivered until the delivery service became so bad. Now I'm down to just the Sunday paper or weekend paper.

Since 1981, it's never been a real Sunday paper. We used to get ours delivered by 9 or 10 Saturday night. The same holds true today for those who get it. Billy our old buddy at the high school - Francie - is the carrier on the Far East Side.

What scares me most about this is the continued lack of information and knowledge that the average person will have. A recent British study showed that 81% of the content in a given "paper" is read by tradtional readers and only 19% by online readers. We are rapidly becoming a society of headline readers and so many times those headlines are unclear or misleading.

This !

Although some people read the last sentence or two of an article too.

My wife and keep saying how,when you read an article,its hard to figure out
how they got the headline.
About the only exception is sports.

Call it what you may, but my answer was in regards to when the Sunday Messenger used to come out at 2:00 on Saturday's, which was true. Now the Sunday Messenger actually does come out early Sunday Morning. Just a simple fact.

There was a period of time in the late 1960s when they didn't print the paper until about 2 a.m. on Sunday morning. They actually had late sports scores and stories in the paper from Saturday evening. Also, I think, back in the 1950s they had a fairly late deadline for breaking stories -- maybe like 10 p.m., Saturday. The paper has gone downhill in many ways in the last decade or so; this latest change is just one indication of the continuation of that decline. I look for the Athens News and the Messenger at some point in the future to be combined, as they now have a common ownership, even though they have entirely different business models. I think it's only a matter of time.

I just laugh at the ways newspapers try to shuffle the Titanic’s deck chairs now that I no longer work in the industry. We went through countless hours of handwringing in meetings trying to balance early deadlines, print times, delivery schedules, reader expectations....all as if it mattered in the face of the technology headwind that was flattening us.

And newspapers drove the ship directly into the iceberg. Poor decisions at every turn.

According to the former Messenger circulation manager, the Sunday paper went to press around 7 Saturday evening. The sports guys had to really hustle to get the Saturday afternoon Bobcat football games in the paper.

On the flip-side, podcasts are exploding in popularity relative to radio and other forms of audio media as consumers are looking for more in-depth coverage.

I often wonder how well studies understand the dynamics of newer forms of technology.

An early warning salvo was delivered by Canadian economist Marshall McLuhan as early as the late 1950s and continuing through the mid 1970s. Few were reading his material; they should have been listening. That there is some word play if you are savvy enough to figure it out. ;-)

Story time on a somewhat related note...

One summer I was an intern at the Pro Football Hall of Fame. During the annual Hall of Fame Game, which was on a Monday night, my job was basically to hang out in the press box and make sure the members of the media got everything they needed. It was kinda cool because I got to see guys who would appear on ESPN programs like "Around the Horn" and "Pardon the Interruption" such as Michael Smith and Jay Mariotti. I also stood next to John Madden and Chris Berman, both a lot larger in person than you might expect. Madden was on his way out at the time and I remember him looking particularly haggard.

So the game ends and all of the columnists are finishing their game stories anywhere between 30 minutes to an hour afterwards. Some had left before the game was over. The story that year was Ricky Williams' return to football after his soul-searching hiatus and Indiana Jones quest for the greatest marijuana you can find.

But one particular guy who was a local beat writer for some city in Florida really wanted to get his story perfect, so I had to hang out in the press box till after midnight while this guy was getting his story in before the morning newspaper deadline. My bosses and colleagues were all toasting to a great Hall of Fame summer while I'm losing my mind waiting for this guy to record his thoughts on the game in his tape recorder. I couldn't exactly kick him out, but it was what it was.

Absolutely.

A newspaper form of Craigslist should’ve been the industry’s crown jewel in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Content should’ve never been given away for free online.

Those two things alone probably allow the industry to remain afloat.

Interesting stats.

https://www.podcastinsights.com/podcast-statistics /

Dinosaur here.

I have a question about Podcasts.

I've listened to a couple,when the host of a radio show talks about a topic I'm
interested in on his or hers.

My paper has a channel guide.
Same with Sirius radio.

Does anyone know if there's some type of listing for Podcasts ?