The Daily Sentinel in Grand Junction is going digital.
Jay Seaton, the publisher of the Daily Sentinel, announced that they will change Monday and Tuesday print editions to electronic versions starting next month.
The digital edition will look like the print edition, but it'll now be in the subscriber's inbox instead of their mailbox for a couple of days a week.
Seaton told Next that this decision was made after weighing a few other options to keep the paper going.
"It's been a very hard decision for me to make, but the options are, you can substantially increase subscription rates for these people which is intolerable to a lot of folks, or you can make significant cuts to your operations, particularly your newsroom," Seaton said. "We have a mission so serve here and I don't think we can do that appropriately with a diminished newsroom."
Out of the options to increase subscription rates, cutting the staff and cutting a few editions of the paper, only one seemed feasible while delivering the same quality of content as before.
Seaton shared that there have been mixed reactions from readers of the Daily Sentinel.
"We get a fair amount of response that's been, we get it, advertising revenue has declined, you have to do what you have to do to serve mission and stay in existence," Seaton said.
On the other hand, Seaton tells us that they have received calls from some readers who are upset that printed newspapers will no longer be available on Monday and Tuesday - especially from those who don't own a computer and don't know how to operate one to read the digital version.
"We've disrupted their routines...they feel like something's been taken from them, that's been rough," Seaton said.
The newspaper is offering seminars at the library in Grand Junction to teach subscribers how to access the online versions if they don't know how to operate a computer. However, he says that many of those people aren't interested in learning.
"We will have a feature in Wednesdays edition in case you missed it, catching up on local news, but some of these folks just see it as, you're taking something from me," Seaton said.
This decision was not an easy one to make for Seaton, but he's committed to delivering good content to his readers. With the decreasing number of people reading print newspapers, printing a daily paper was getting to be too expensive.
"What we need to be able to offer people is the news in the way they want to consume it," Seaton said.
Seaton shared that the newspaper bought four radio stations in the Grand Junction area after the cross-ownership between newspapers and radio stations became allowed. He said that the Daily Sentinel is trying to find revenue opportunities to keep growing.
"We need to get our hustle on as an industry to survive all of this, and we need to do it without diminishing our news operations," Seaton said.
