Earlier this year, The Columbian made a decision that had a drastic impact on the way sports get reported in the printed edition of the newspaper.
Because the number of subscribers who have to have their papers delivered by mail continues to grow, many readers were unable to receive their Sunday Columbian until their mail arrives sometime late in the day on Monday.
So the decision was made to take all of the content that would have gone into Sunday’s paper and move it into Saturday’s paper — making Saturday’s weekend edition like a double edition.
And while that change may work out well for comics, features or in-depth enterprise news stories, it doesn’t work so well when your Sunday sports section is typically filled with news of events that happened on Saturday.
But we’ve done our best to adjust to the change, providing robust sports coverage of high school sports and Northwest college and pro sports on our website, Columbian.com.
And I believe many of our readers have adjusted to that change.
But now things get a bit more tricky. We are in the midst of high school state championships for the fall sports, and we will have several local high school teams who will be in contention for a state championship.
Often when we visit local high schools, we will see displayed on the walls of the schools stories cut out of The Columbian newspaper about a state championship won by a local team or athlete. Sometimes, it’s the entire front page of the sports section capturing those championship moments.
These are the times when the printed newspaper becomes a keepsake of big moments in local sports.
These championship moments often take place on Saturday. But now, The Columbian doesn’t have a Sunday print edition to capture those moments. There isn’t even a Monday print edition of The Columbian anymore.
We do have an alternative for you. The Columbian produces an e-edition on Monday. This is a digital reproduction of the pages that would otherwise be published in the printed form the other days of the week.
This Monday, The Columbian e-edition will be filled with all the content from the 2A and 1A state volleyball championships that in previous years would have appeared in the Sunday print edition. It will also include content on playoff football and soccer games and the state swimming championships.
This page is available to anyone with a print or digital subscription to The Columbian. E-edition pages can be downloaded and saved.
And if readers want a professionally printed copy, suitable for framing, of an e-edition page, they can request one for a fee by contacting frontdesk@columbian.com.
Many readers over the past two seasons have enjoyed our bonus e-edition page on Friday high school football. The production of these special pages ended after last week, because the number of Friday football games going forward are not enough to support a full page on Saturday.
But there will be available coverage in the Monday e-edition sports section.
We also plan to have some photos and follow-up stories in Tuesday’s print edition of The Columbian.
And, of course, we will continue to provide a high level of preps coverage online at Columbian.com and 360preps.com.
The plan is now in place. Now, we just need some state champions to celebrate.
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Tim Martinez is the assistant sports editor/prep coordinator for The Columbian. He can be contacted at tim.martinez@columbian.com, 360-735-4538, or follow @360TMart on Instagram and X (Twitter).
