Editorial: Don’t look for this news magazine next Monday

The Apr. 9 issue of Monday Morning News will be the last issue of Monday Morning News we publish. No, we are not going out of business – far from it.

Beginning next week our publication will stop coming out on Mondays and will begin coming out on Wednesday’s instead. Now, because it would be silly to call a Wednesday news publication Monday Morning News, we are changing the name of our weekly news magazine to reflect the publication’s primary focus. Effective Apr. 18 our publication will be called The Morinville News.

The motivation behind the change in title and publication date is to better align our print readership with our online readership.

MorinvilleNews.com began in the summer of 2010 because I felt Morinville needed a community news publication that delivered the news while it was still news. We’ve held to that mandate with our online publication since day one, and we’ve rapidly become the go to source for local news because of it.

We’ve done our best to make Monday Morning News as relevant and timely as possible, but because of the timelines necessary to make weekly print publications possible, we felt Monday Morning News was just not as timely as we wanted it to be. You’ve told us repeatedly we were doing a good job, but we’ve told ourselves we must do better.

This was particularly true with respect to the many great events happening in Morinville on the weekends. For example, the concert photo on the cover of the Apr. 9 edition of Monday Morning News was published on MorinvilleNews.com Apr. 2, a full week earlier.

By switching our publication date to Wednesdays, we will now be able to bring weekend news coverage to our print readers shortly after we bring it to our online readers.

It is a small change that we feel makes a big difference to readers of our print edition. We respect and understand that Morinville is made up of a variety of age groups and that those age groups want their news delivered in different formats. We want to make the joints between our two formats as seamless as possible.

We have never tried to emulate the business model of the little rural tabloids that have been so common in the region for the past several decades because we have long felt jamming newsprint in your mail box is not the way to deliver the news today. The Morinville News will continue to be available in our local stores and restaurants because we want to encourage our readers to support our local businesses. We’ve always felt if you build a publication worthy of the reader’s time, they will come to you to get it. And week after week you have, online and offline. We are grateful for that support and for your many kind words about our coverage of the news in our community.

Under the united banner of The Morinville News, we are committed to continuing to earn your support and your trust as Morinville’s locally owned and community invested news organization.

Stephen Dafoe
Editor, The Morinville News

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4 Comments

  1. Stephen,

    As a person who tends to find out about town news well after it has happened, I appreciate being able to go online and see what is going on locally. If it weren’t for The Morinville News, I would be in the dark and lacking details on a lot of important issues.

    I will be sure to adjust my internal clock to go online to check the news on Wednesday rather than Monday. But I must admit, it was a great way to start the work week.

    Please keep up the good work.

    Thanks,

    Brent Henry

    • Thanks. You do realize you can go online every day for the day’s news. We post news Monday through Friday and increasingly on the weekends, too.

      You can also subscribe for free to receive a daily email of that day’s headlines – allowing you to access the articles of interest at the click of a button.

  2. Brent, I think you may have missed what Stephen was trying ot say in the original Editorial. I don’t believe the online news will be changing, it’s the actual printed Morinville News that will change days.

    • That is entirely correct. We are shifting the publication date of the print publication to Wednesdays so we can bring our print readers the news almost as quickly as we will continue to provide our online readers with the news.

      By pushing our print day after the weekend instead of before it, we can bring most weekend news within a couple days instead of a whole week.

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