A tough but necessary decision

Three days after the big announcement, Jack Ryan, editor of the Enterprise-Journal in McComb, Miss., said he was surprised by the quiet reaction to the paper's decision to stop printing a Monday edition.

"It's no secret that the advertising market is tough, especially when Mississippi's economy stubbornly resists improvement," Ryan said. 

He added, "There were three ways to adjust our business to reflect the times, and stopping the presses on Mondays was the least disruptive. The others were a subscription increase of about $2 per month or the elimination of a couple of jobs."

In a column published Sunday, Feb. 4, Ryan told readers that they will still receive the same amount of news with five papers a week.

He wrote:

"Eliminating the Monday paper will force us to pay more attention to our website. That's the direction the world is heading and we need to be there, too.

"The plan is to have several stories on the website, www.enterprise-journal.com, every Monday to take the place of the paper. Hopefully this will include a crime or public safety story, a local feature, an opinion column, a sports story, the obituaries and few stories from The Associated Press.

"None of Monday's report will be blocked by our website paywall. That means you don't have to be a subscriber to read it. (Note to Facebook complainers: You finally get some free government cheese.)

"Recognizing that a lot of our readers have limited use of the internet, we will run some of Monday's report in the next day's paper. All the Monday obituaries will be printed on Tuesday.

"A good Monday story will run in full on Tuesday, and parts of the others will be printed as well, with a note pointing readers to the website if they wish to read the entire piece.

"Another change will be an increase of pages in the weekday papers. The Tuesday through Friday editions will have two more pages in them than usual. That will make up for most of the 10 pages in the Monday paper."

While he said it still bothers him to drop the Monday paper, he is balancing that disappointment with the opportunity to improve the paper's online presence.