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Coronavirus leaving lasting impact on newspaper: Times-Villager moves to once a week, launches new website

By: 
Brian Roebke

More than three months into the coronavirus pandemic in the United States, the effects have been wide ranging.

There were minor effects like safety precautions at workplaces, to major effects like people losing jobs and businesses closing.

At the Times-Villager, we changed publication from twice a week to once a week due to low advertising, which is our primary source of revenue.

We are now making that change permanent.

I know this will disappoint some people since the newspaper has a long tradition of publishing twice per week, but times have changed. We don’t expect advertising to return to pre-coronavirus levels for months if not years, because businesses have been hit so hard.

This publication change should allow us to remain financially viable for the long term.

Going forward, you will see larger newspapers once a week at a lower price. All current subscribers will have their subscriptions extended to account for the number of issues we have not published during the past three months and in the future. Our base subscription price is lowering from $49 to $36 per year.

While we will have just one paper per week, we’re launching a new website, TimesVillager.com, to include nearly all of our news as well as time-sensitive stories and obituaries.

Access to our website will be free to everyone for a limited time, but eventually will be for subscribers only. We will also offer a digital-only subscription as well as an option to subscribe to both the digital and print editions.

We hope you will continue to support our newspaper that provides plenty of local and state-wide information gathered by experienced reporters that cannot be obtained elsewhere.