Whatchamacolumn: It does, after all, take a community

Some have urged us to keep reminding readers about changes shaping up for the News-Register — they include variations in space, time, frequency, dimension and, arguably, “state of matter.”

Beginning in January, our printed News-Register will be distributed via U.S. mail once weekly on Fridays, with elimination of the Tuesday print issue. It will be almost exactly the same width, but 5.25 inches shorter — we call it the mini-broadsheet format.

There will be three weekly “e-editions” — a replica of our Friday print issue available Thursday evening, plus independent digital issues published Monday and Wednesday evenings. That change reminds us of an interesting theory put forth by a UK physicist: “By 2245, half of Earth’s mass will be converted to digital information mass, making digital information the fifth state of matter.”

About half of our print subscribers have online accounts at www.NewsRegister.com, giving them 24/7 access to e-editions, current online articles, searchable archives and more. Many people only want their local news in print, which we fully understand, but going forward you will need an online account to read all the weekly news we publish.

If you don’t have an online account, here’s a simple solution: Send an email from the address you want connected to your account; include the name and delivery address of your print subscription; send it to ccrafton@newsregister.com, and we’ll do the rest.

Those various newspaper facelifts are cosmetic deviations on a long-running theme. But for us, the more dramatic change involves responses to the broken business model of community newspapers.

We will ask for reader support in the form of “premium” subscriptions, and urge local businesses to increase their local print promotion budgets. Those two interests will merge into efforts to advance win/win synergies between our newspaper readers and our newspaper advertisers.

The demise and demotion of thousands of newspapers has created a wave of nonprofit funding programs hoping to help save community journalism. Our strategies for 2024 include a variation of that cause through a local program taking tax deductible contributions toward specialized journalism projects.

But first things first. Before starting these difficult “asks,” we want to urge more widespread support for all the worthy causes in our community.

Pull out your recent print copy of our annual “Season of Giving” section, or look online for a digital copy; look through for the causes you might support with year-end contributions; note the local businesses that sponsored those nonprofit organization messages, and remember them in your last-minute Christmas shopping sprees.

After all, as always, it takes a community.

News-Register Publisher Jeb Bladine can be reached at jbladine@newsregister.com or 503-687-1223.