EDITORIAL: Coronavirus speeds Observer’s transition

Published 7:00 am Sunday, May 31, 2020

The newspaper delivered this morning will be your last Sunday edition of The Moultrie Observer.

The Observer was founded as a weekly in 1894. After changing hands twice, it became a daily newspaper June 19, 1905, under the leadership of Publisher C.B. “Bert” Allen. It continued publishing Monday through Saturday for decades.

We printed our first Sunday newspaper May 15, 1954, a special edition focused on a brutal murder and the manhunt that followed.

On July 13, 1997, we dropped the Monday edition to add a newspaper every Sunday, initially published in cooperation with our sister newspaper, The Tifton Gazette. Before the end of that year, all news content was unique to each location, even though we’ve continued to share advertising with The Gazette right up to today.

We stopped Saturday publication on May 4, 2013, and started publishing only Wednesday, Friday and Sunday editions on Oct. 3, 2018.

Starting next week, the print edition of The Moultrie Observer will come out only on Wednesdays.

With the history of The Observer crammed into those five paragraphs, it appears to be a tale of decay and loss. A very sad story.

But the print edition is only part of The Observer’s story. It’s a story not of decay but of transformation.

We started www.moultrieobserver.com in the summer of 2001. Early on there was nothing but obituaries and teases to the stories in the next morning’s newspaper.

Over time, the website grew. We added a paywall so subscribers could access all the news that we put into the print edition of the newspaper. In the current incarnation, you’re receiving even more online than in print, with weather alerts and breaking news that would be irrelevant by the next morning’s edition.

Thousands of people turn to our website over the course of each month, adding up to hundreds of thousands of pageviews. May’s numbers won’t be available until next week, but in April, moultrieobserer.com had 292,431 pageviews. Each pageview is a reader looking at a news story, a sports feature, a crime report, an obituary.

Lately, a lot of that news has been made available free of charge so that even non-subscribers can keep up with the coronavirus pandemic.

The struggles of the newspaper industry are not new, and we’re far from the only local business hurt by the pandemic and the response to it. While our preference might have been to continue supporting three-day-a-week print publication while giving the website even more time to grow, financial realities have forced our hand.

But at the same time, the website provides incredible opportunities to reach our community quickly with a wide array of storytelling tools that aren’t available on a printed page.

Come join us online. If you’re not a subscriber — or if you’re a print subscriber who hasn’t activated your digital subscription — contact us at MOB.circulation@gaflnews.com to get started. We’ll be updating the website every day with news, sports, opinions and more.

For those who wish to continue receiving the print edition, we promise every week’s issue will be filled with the best of what we’ve put online over the preceding week. Some of your favorite features — the Dear Abby column, comic strips and puzzles, for example — will be available only in the print edition.

You’ll have a daily newspaper online and a weekly newspaper in the mail.

It all starts next week.