This year's meager snowfall in the High Sierra is exacerbating the toll our sinking economy is taking on communities in the mountains — and their newspapers.
That's what I discovered when I went up to Lake Tahoe over the weekend to take my kids sledding.
Effective today, The Tahoe Daily Tribune in South Lake Tahoe has cut back its circulation to three days a week, from its customary five day (M-F) schedule.
Publisher Mary Jurkonis tried to place the move in the best possible light.
"This is not the end of an era a much as it's the beginning of an era," she said in a report in her newspaper on Friday. "We're positioning the Tahoe Daily Tribune to be more of a 21st Century newspaper as we shift more resources to focus on developing more local stories and breaking that content online every day."
In place of the 5 day-a-week home delivery schedule, the paper will now offer a Monday on-line edition, to be called iTrib. "This is not a decision that we took lightly," Jurkonis said. "In light of unprecedented hikes in the cost of newsprint this past year, and the overall realities of the current economy, we had to make some radical moves to reduce expenses."
The Tahoe Daily Tribune is not the only newspaper in California to make similar radical moves. Just two weeks ago, the Sierra Sun on Lake Tahoe's North Shore, also trimmed two days from its circulation cycle. Last September, the long struggling Daily Californian, the student newspaper at UC Berkeley, also cut its print distribution from five to four days a week. The Palo Alto Daily News, a free "daily," eliminated its Monday edition last June. Making the most drastic move of all, the Gilroy Dispatch cut back from five to two days a week — Tuesday and Friday, in part because 82 percent of the paper's revenues were generated on those two days.
Steve Staloch, the Dispatch's publisher, told the Newspaper Association of America that his paper actually produces more pages on the days it publishes, and are also putting more resources into the paper's website. "I look at some metro papers, and wonder why still produce a paper seven days a week. I'd venture to say we'll see five day-a-week papers in larger markets soon."
Coming as it did in the same week that the Los Angeles Times announced further cutbacks in its newsroom, the retrenchment of the Daily Tribune on the shores of Lake Tahoe underscored the obvious: no newspaper, big or small, is immune from the tempests enveloping an entire industry.
