What to expect moving forward

Wow, what a week! For those who did not see last week’s paper, you are probably surprised that there is only one paper now. Unfortunately, we had to merge the newspaper, in response, in part, to COVID-19. For those who are keeping up, you probably saw we decided to NOT go with Cass County Now (the name of our website) for the name of our newspaper. Instead, since we are merging two historical newspapers into one, we felt like it was important to keep the namesakes of each paper hence the name will be the Cass County Citizens Journal-Sun.

Nothing else will change - our focus is still the same - to cover the events, news, and what matters most to the residents of greater Cass County.

What will change from our previous two papers is that we will begin to enhance and expand your news experience by furthermore incorporating social media, our website, and email alerts making sure you know what is happening NOW in Cass County.

In the paper itself, bringing two newspapers together, along with a fresh vision, will take some time to fully integrate. That said, our hard-working production team is already moving towards making the paper fun and easy to read. The size of the paper should be at least 14 pages every week with some weeks much more. For the time being, we will not have a crossword or activity page in the paper. We are currently looking for a business that will sponsor it.

As I explained last week, COVID-19 was the final straw that pushed us into having to merge the two papers.

Moving forward we are going to try to be as shrewd as possible to make sure we keep a full, healthy county newspaper moving forward.

Part of doing that requires making changes to our prices.

First, since the overall size of the newspaper will increase and it has been several years since we have raised our price on the Journal, we are going to raise the subscription price a few dollars to those who live in town from $37 to $40. We realize for the Sun it will be a big jump. We apologize, however we need to, at the very least, pay for the cost of producing the newspaper.

Out of county, the cost will jump to $50, and out of state $75. Those living out of the area may consider purchasing an e-edition for $40, which is the same newspaper that everyone else gets but in digital form.

The nice thing, with this option, is that it also gives you access to getting up-todate news that is loaded on our website that is blocked to everyone else. It should be noted everyone who gets a physical copy can get a digital copy for free, just contact us.

Next, since we will be advertising to a larger audience our advertising rates will go up slightly. The column inch price will be moving up to 9.25 per column inch. We also now have special rates for our website, our email updates, video feeds, and social media. Contact a sales rep for more information.

Lastly, our classified ads, which include obituaries will be priced at $15.65 for the first 15 words and 30 cents for each additional word.

I apologize for all the changes. Our team loves this community and is doing everything we can do to make sure we have a good hometown newspaper for years to come. For that to happen, it is essential as a community we do it together.

If you have any suggestions please call me, send me a letter or email me at shawn@casscountynow.com