Birmingham, Mobile and Huntsville to publish three days a week

Progress?

 

Subscribers receiving Progress sections will be charged $1 automatically.

/crossthreading/

 

Now THAT's Progress for ya.

 

Have the subscription rates been announced for the move to three times week?

 

The contagion spreads to Anniston. Mercifully they're only cutting Mondays.

http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/mediawire/180414/anniston-star-to-reduce-print-eliminate-monday-edition/

This is easily the biggest hell-raising paper in the state. What struck me was the difference in circulation between Sunday and Monday was < 3500. Shows you how squeezed to the penny things are getting.

 

Bad news, and a troubling sign.
The good news is, they're not laying anyone off and from the sound of it they're just transitioning the Monday print edition to an online edition. The article said they'll also print on Mondays after big events, like the races at Talladega.
In other words, they have a plan instead of burning the place to the ground for the insurance money.

 

Montgomery is next.

 

And after Montgomery, Ward.

 

Within this link, it also says Anniston is dropping AP when the contract expires in two years. So the other six days' papers will get skinner:

http://annistonstar.com/view/full_story/19245293/article-Star-to-end-Monday-edition-in-October

 

I can see a bunch more papers eventually dropping Mondays, especially if there's nothing worth covering locally. Not everywhere has a major sports team, etc., so it's one reporter/editor, a designer, and a few press guys at the smaller papers. Why bother staffing on Sundays? Maybe a reporter to listen to the scanner while working on his long-term projects, but not a skeleton crew for a whole edition.

 

Weird, I remember reading an article about how successful Anniston had been with its Monday edition.

They had basically turned it into a slammer-style mug shots and felony arrests record and also included a most wanted feature.

Some heat had also been applied because the vast majority of the mug shots were of black people and that was painting a racist picture or something something. So unless they dropped that, it is interesting to see such a total reversal.

 

What scares me more is that stereotypes of Alabama and other southern states will be elevated because of what's happening to the industry.