For the past seven or eight months, certainly before I got here, about 12,000 residents of Emery and Carbon counties were treated to a free Thursday newspaper courtesy of the Sun Advocate.
While I too enjoy receiving things for free, I can no longer financially justify the costs associated with a free Thursday edition. Advertising, unfortunately, doesn’t even cover the postage rates I pay each week, not to mention the printing and labor costs associated with this product.
So I want to announce here that beginning the week of Aug. 7, Castle Country Living will no longer appear on your doorsteps or in your mailboxes.
Luckily, it isn’t exactly going away. Instead of simply dropping the whole product, what I’ve decided to do is fold it into the Tuesday Sun Advocate, creating a more robust newspaper once a week for our subscribers in Carbon County. In Emery County, this section will appear in Tuesday editions of the Emery County Progress for subscribers there.
Advertiser, will still be able to reach their customers in both counties, and at a much more reasonable rate than offered currently.
While I appreciate the idea behind Castle Country Living, I run a business, and keeping around a product that doesn’t pay for itself doesn’t make any business sense to me.
Besides, our subscribers pay to read our products. It was never really fair to them that we hand out a free version to people who don’t care enough to pay for our services.
That said, I hope you can appreciate the difficult business climate we operate under, in fact, that the whole newspaper industry operates under.
I’ve been in this business for nearly 20 years, and every year I wonder how much worse it can get. Just today, the New York Daily News laid off half its editorial staff. They’re just the latest newspaper in a long line of seemingly perpetual shrinking.
Newspapers large and small have been decimated throughout my career, the decline starting a generation before I ever knew what a newspaper was. And the repercussions of this are incalculable. The costs of this will far outweigh what you pay to read the paper, or what advertisers pay to advertise.
As challenging as this industry, and this profession, has been for me and many, many friends and colleagues, we don’t do this for the money. We come to work each day pursuing a passion inextricably linked with fulfilling a promise made by our nation’s founding fathers.
We come to work each day hoping to help you see the world with clearer eyes, provide information that you can trust, hold people accountable who affect your lives daily. It’s not always pretty what we do. We certainly make our fair share of mistakes. But we do have to treat our finances seriously in the face of daunting economic challenges.
If you’ve come to enjoy Castle Country Living, please consider subscribing to the Sun Advocate.
I hope to continue improving your local newspaper over the next few months. My staff and I strive every day to fulfill a professional and patriotic obligation, but your support is absolutely necessary for us to be successful.
We appreciate your understanding.
—Matt Ward, Editor
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