Hanover (Pa.) Evening Sun goes to 3-a-week

http://www.eveningsun.com/opinion/ci_23247915/our-future-3-days-print-7-online

That is all.

 

I'm sick.

Nothing mentioned there about job losses, which I hope are not inevitable (but I'm not holding my breath).

 

The Evening Sun publisher Sara Glines announced no staff reductions are planned at this time. That's akin to the kiss of death.

 

The reporters there making $23K shouldn't wait for a pink slip.

 

I'm a sports reporter here. Sara said she didn't expect us to lose any staff, but the sports editor, Chuck Curley, was laid off a couple of months ago; we recently lost a photographer and replaced him with an extended freelancer; and we lost a news reporter position a while back. So staff has been cut already, whether in preparation for this move or just through what would've happened because it's the journalism industry, I don't know.

My biggest concern is how many people will switch their subscription to the other newspapers in the market, the Gettysburg Times or York Daily Record (owned by the same company, but not switching to three days). Sara said she thought the losses would be minimal. We'll see.

We're not sure what other two days (in addition to Sunday) we'll be publishing. The higher-ups want to talk to advertisers and hold a subscriber's poll. We have not discussed the move much, but it'll be made in January, so there's plenty of time to figure out what we want to do.

I'll be happy to answer any questions you guys may have.

 

If Sara and the execs with MediaNews don't know what days the paper is going to publish, they are f***ing idiots. You don't scrap four days of print editions just for kicks and giggles.

 

Chuck is a good guy, a better person and a journalism lifer. Gotta love how we treat our own.

 

They know. They can't come out and announce it without first going through the motions of consulting their top advertisers in order to get their "input" (read: buy-in). And they couldn't have consulted the advertisers in advance without causing a leak of the information. So this is all just part of the master plan.

 

Judging by the most popular days for ROP ads and inserts in much of the country, probably W-F-Sun.

Hope you and your colleagues come through this OK, Daniel P.

 

The schedule is what I'm guessing is going to happen and what I'm hoping for. Thanks for the kind words. We share content with the Daily Record so our editions should be filled with local stuff, as they are now. Not sure how many papers our size can have four or five games covered in the middle of the season.

 

My question for these small dailies - isn't the daily print product the only thing worth putting together?

I mean, who in Hanover, Pa., really is going to the Hanover web-site to read the news?

People in small towns still buy small town papers, so this seems like cutting off your nose to spite your face.

 

Well, try to look at the bright side. No more dreaded Monday paper to put out that scuttles your Sunday day off recreation plans.

A little more time to work on features and enterprise stuff, because you're not frantically scrambling to put out a paper seven days a week.

More flexibility in scheduling. In my last couple of years in the business, the absolute necessity of having someone competent in the office 365 days per year, given staff reductions, got to be a real burden.

Not having a Saturday edition puts a crimp in high school game coverage, if that's one's thing. But you can still do it online and maybe do some sort of followups/features/enterprise in the Sunday edition.

so there are bright spots if you choose to find them.