As I am fond of telling anyone who will listen, The Columbian is a family-owned small business, not part of a corporate newspaper chain like The Oregonian is. But there is one asterisk.
Since 2004, The Columbian has owned the Camas-Washougal Post-Record, a weekly newspaper that has been serving east Clark County since 1908. It has a staff of three: Editor Kelly Moyer, reporter Doug Flanagan and advertising representative Shelly Atwell.
It’s delivered by mail Thursdays and has its own website, www.camaspostrecord.com. We’re planning to continue to publish the Post-Record, but we are going to pool its resources with those of The Columbian beginning this month. We think doing so has the potential to improve both newspapers.
Let me give you a little background. Like virtually every other U.S. newspaper, the Post-Record has been experiencing decreased revenue. Main Street businesses, whose advertisements were the heart of weekly newspapers’ revenue, have closed or moved their ads online. With only one issue a week, circulation revenue can’t be increased enough to offset these advertising losses. That’s why hundreds of U.S. newspapers have closed.
To make both papers stronger, we can work together.
We are already doing this. Kelly and Doug have had desks at The Columbian since we sold the Post-Record building a few years ago. We often run abbreviated versions of their Thursday stories in our Saturday edition, and on occasion Kelly has run our Sports stories in the Post-Record, particularly at tournament time. And one of our copy editors designs and produces the Post-Record’s pages.
But Kelly and Doug have decided on what stories they’ll cover. Sometimes that results in a duplication of effort. Last week, for example, Doug wrote a story about a fatal car crash outside the Big Foot Inn in Washougal. So did The Columbian’s Jessica Prokop. One of the first benefits of this merger will be to share these kinds of stories.
Post-Record readers can also look forward to more coverage of Camas and Washougal high school and community sports. We’ll be able to share our courts coverage, and stories about county government.
For the first time, we’ll allow Kelly and Doug to work with our photojournalists, which will improve the Post-Record’s visual storytelling. We also want to offer our calendar of events to Post-Record readers.
Finally, we want to redesign the look of the Post-Record to make it a bit more modern.
Columbian readers win because we will publish more timely stories from east Clark County. We’re hoping that our expanded team will be able to cover more news in Battle Ground, Ridgefield and La Center. And Kelly will bring her knowledge and years of experience to our metro desk as our regional news editor, while still having time to do some reporting.
It’s going to be a gradual phase-in, not all at once. I’m excited by the potential.
Next Thursday’s paper
President Joe Biden has declared Thursday a federal holiday in honor of Jimmy Carter. Agencies where employees will get the day off include the U.S. Postal Service. As a result, print readers should receive their Thursday newspaper in the Friday mail, along with their Friday edition.
We’ll print the Thursday TV grid a day early, in the Wednesday paper, and again on Thursday for the benefit of ePaper readers. Same goes with the TV listings in the Sports section.
The postal holiday won’t affect our newsletters, our website or our Thursday ePaper, which will be published as usual early that morning.
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