Area newspapers

Area Newspapers: Publishing Weekly, But Not Weakly

By: Becky Taylor
Editor: Rachel Bunn

In the past, newspapers only carried the news.

Today, the newspaper itself is making headlines. Some major newspapers have folded, others have cut back their distribution, most have cut back their staff, and even more report a loss in readership.

But outside of the big cities, the news about the news is not all bad.

Four weekly Athens-area newspapers report one effect of the struggling economy is hurting their revenue, but all say their circulation figures have remained stable. One even reported that they were actually expanding.

The Oglethorpe Echo is a weekly newspaper in Lexington, Ga., that serves all of Oglethorpe County. Brenda Norman, bookkeeper for the paper, said that advertising has been down. The amount of subscribers, though, seems to be the same.

“I think that’s been pretty steady,” said Norman.

With a circulation at 4,800, the Oglethorpe Echo is only available to readers in a print format as it not available on the Internet.

Norman said there were currently no plans to go in that direction. She said that the newspaper currently lacked the staff to host the paper on the Internet.

“It’s like doing a completely different paper,” said Norman.

Just a little further south, in the city of Greensboro is The Herald-Journal. This newspaper is also a weekly and covers Greene County.

Like the Oglethorpe Echo, The Herald-Journal has also seen a drop in the usual amount of advertising. However, Jan Foster, general manager of the newspaper, reports that this is picking back up.

Also like the case in Lexington, readership of The Herald-Journal has not gone down. Foster estimated the paper’s circulation to be about 5,200.

The Herald-Journal does have a Web site at http://www.theheraldjournalonline.com/, but only to a minimum degree. Only a limited amount of pages are available on the Internet for readers to view.

“We’re thinking about expanding online,” said Foster.

Foster said, though, that putting all material available on the Internet was not the ideal business model.

“If you put all your pages online, you’ll hurt your subscription base,” she said.

Over to the northwest is Madison, Ga., with the Morgan County Citizen. Publisher Patrick Yost said its circulation was 5,000.

Yost also said advertising was “sluggish,” but the circulation figure had remained steady.

In addition to its print edition, all of the information contained within the pages of the Citizen is available online at http://www.morgancountycitizen.com/. Unlike The Greensboro Herald-Journal, Yost believes there have not been any negative effects of having all the content available for free.

Yost said the only potential change that could happen with the Web site is perhaps an increase in advertising.

Continuing south, the city of Eatonton, Ga., is seeing something different for the current state of newspapers.

“We’re actually growing,” Judy Maxwell, editor of The Eatonton Messenger, said.

Maxwell said the newspaper had a circulation of 7,000 and its two associated magazines had a circulation of 4,000. Although she said that advertising had been slightly down in the paper, they were currently expanding.

While Maxwell did not know an exact date, she said there would be a new newspaper coming along in the county. Tentative plans had the first issue rolling off the press this fall. In addition to the two already circulating, she said another magazine would start printing in spring 2010.

In addition to its expanding its printed product, Maxwell said The Eatonton Messenger was going to expand its Web site, which is at www.msgr.com/meesengeronline.htm.

This is quite a change, she said, considering that the newspaper’s Web site had only recently become operational again. For about one year it had been offline.

The Oglethorpe Echo's office in Lexington, Ga. The only way to read the Echo is in printed form.