When I first began working at The Columbian-Progress more than five years ago, I had no idea what I was in store for. I went to journalism school at Southern Miss and was an editor for the university’s newspaper, but there’s a big difference between school and the real world.
I started off as the sports editor with my only true responsibilities pertaining to covering sports. I covered games and wrote feature stories for roughly the first two years before more and more started to change. When our former production manager left, it became my job to lay out the sports section. At the time, I didn’t think there was any way I could fit that into my regular schedule, but I figured out how to manage my time better while learning the ins and outs of the software.
Then as the personnel around me continued to shift, I began picking up even more responsibilities until the point I’m at today as managing editor. Each time, when more duties were added to my already full plate, I found a way to change and adapt to what was needed of me.
Change, in every facet of our lives, is inevitable. The scariest thing about change is the unknown because you can’t control what you don’t know. We’re all just trying to control our circumstances to the best of our abilities every day, whether it’s at home or in our jobs, but that degree of the unknown can be frightening. It causes us to respond in irrational ways sometimes, but typically, over time, we find a way to change and adapt ourselves until the change becomes the new normal — a phrase I’m sure we’re all tired of hearing these days.
But here we are, at The Columbian-Progress, set to embark on a big change that may upset some of our readers, but it truly is for the best. Beginning with our next edition, we will begin publishing once weekly every Thursday as opposed to twice weekly on Thursdays and Saturdays.
The financial climate has changed drastically over the past 20 years for the newspaper business with the steady decrease of advertising, and it’s been exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic. As the economics changed over the past couple of decades, the C-P has been proactive in reacting to the revenue decline with several changes, primarily adjusting job roles and reducing the size of the paper.
The workload never changed, though, and in a lot of ways it has grown as we maintain and continuously strive to make improvements on the digital side of our business. We have simply worked harder to be able to do it all, and we have been fortunate to have a great staff that has been able to keep up with the workload.
But as everyone knows, when people get overloaded, things start to slip through the cracks. That’s no longer going to be an issue at the C-P with this adjustment to become a weekly newspaper. We are going to have the leeway and the time to improve our products across the board.
Our news coverage is only going to get better as we will be able to pursue a lot of the in-depth reporting and feature stories we always want to do but seemingly never have the time for. The biggest improvement is going to come with our website.
Besides breaking news, the majority of articles on our website go live after the newspaper goes on racks throughout the county and is mailed. That is going to change. We will be able to deliver the news in a much timelier manner, and there will be a lot more content available to our readers daily.
Every news organization across the country, particularly businesses that have historically relied on their printed products, is directing more and more resources towards their online footprint. Our readers will remain at the forefront of everything we do, and that’s not going to change with this modification.
It’s going to be an adjustment for everyone involved, and it’s not lost on us that some of you will not be happy about losing the Saturday edition. We have delayed making this decision for as long as we could, but the time is now to move forward so that we can provide Marion County with the coverage it deserves.
Joshua Campbell is managing editor of The Columbian-Progress. Reach him via email at joshuacampbell@columbianprogress.com or call (601) 736-2611.
