A Daily Newspaperless Labor Day in Montgomery

   

   The company that owns The Montgomery Advertiser, Gannett, reportedly told that paper, and the other papers it owns across the country, not to print a paper on Labor Day.

     I put that "headline" in the largest typeface offered by Google because it is that significant of an event.  

     The Advertiser is the largest seven-day-a-week paper left in Alabama, after The Birmingham News, The Mobile Register and The Huntsville Times dropped back to a three-day-a-week printing scheduled on October 1, 2012. While that promoted The Montgomery Advertiser, it also made Birmingham the largest city in America without a daily published newspaper.

     About The Montgomery Advertiser History:

"The newspaper began publication in 1829 and was called The Planter°s Gazette. It became the Montgomery Advertiser in 1833 and emerged as the leading newspaper of the new Confederate states by 1861.After the Civil War, Major William Wallace Screws, a Confederate veteran, became the editor and began to lead the publication toward editorial prominence in Alabama." (From "About The Advertiser" on the paper's website.)

     I was confident The Advertiser has had days in its almost 200 year history when it has not printed, days perhaps when a fire or other accident at the plant prevented publishing. I inquired about that possibility, and the Gannett decision, but News Director Steve Arnold did not reply.

     Word of the decision came indirectly from a story in Editor & Publisher, an industry publication...

"Gannett directed its newspapers across the country not to publish a print edition on the holiday."

     And it comes days after Gannet decided to close a half dozen papers in upstate New York:

"...six weekly newspapers published by Gannet’s Daily Messenger,of Canandaigua County, New York, will close the week of Oct. 24, according to the company’s Rochester (NY) Democrat & Chronicle.

As The N.Y. Times reported in 2019:

The combination of GateHouse Media and Gannett — already the two largest newspaper owners in the country, by both number of papers and print circulation, according to researchers at the University of North Carolina — means that more than 550 newspapers, 300 of them weeklies, will have the same owner.

 

   Newspapering has been hurt more than  any media in the wake of the digital takeover of media..The number of newspaper employees has dropped from 71,640 in 2004 to 30,820 in 2020.

 

     I mourn the loss of the journalists and the journalism that has been lost. But I fear the six-day-a-week schedule followed by The Advertiser last week, or an even more severe cutback to fewer days, will become regular.