Centre Daily Times announces upcoming changes to weekend print edition, daily eEdition
Too many times to count this year, I have had conversations with readers about the limitations of print, whether it’s about election night results or news that breaks in evening hours but is absent from the next day’s front page.
I tell people I work at “the newspaper,” (it’s a name I think will always just stick,) but the truth is that the physical paper is just one way the Centre Daily Times delivers news and information to our community. How our local journalism is delivered has been a continual evolution, and today we’re announcing a next step that brings a change to our weekend print edition and an expanded, dynamic eEdition.
Part of the changes are a result of moving our printing operation from Harrisburg to the Altoona Mirror, a shift that will be effective Feb. 6. The day subscribers receive our weekend edition will shift from Sunday to Saturday. The physical paper that’s produced for Saturday will include everything that’s now in Sunday’s paper – comics, puzzles, the Good Life and business sections and a spotlight on impactful journalism and deep reporting from our community.
There will no longer be a physical paper or delivery on Sundays. An eEdition will be produced each Sunday, with a twist that we’re excited to introduce on other days, as well: Dynamic pages that include all of the latest and late-breaking news.
Readers of our current eEdition know that it’s a replica of our current print paper. Available to all subscribers, you can open it from your desktop, mobile device or through our app. You can share stories there, print them and navigate easily between sections. Each day there are dozens of pages in Extra Extra with national news, business, sports and special content. But really, the same restrictions as the physical paper apply. It’s a product that has deadlines and is often missing the latest headlines found on CentreDaily.com.
That changes in February when we launch the dynamic eEdition to bridge the gap between the up-to-the-minute world of digital news and the curated nature of print newspapers.
It’s no secret that print deadlines have crept earlier and earlier in recent years, but the dynamic eEdition is unaffected by those. When subscribers open the eEdition, they’ll find the most recent news and sports that can’t be found in that day’s newspaper.
Take Penn State football, for example. Print deadlines make it impossible for stories about late afternoon or evening games to appear in the next day’s paper. With the new eEdition, those stories — along with other news from Saturday — will be there in the format many readers have told us they prefer to clicking the stories at CentreDaily.com.
If you read our election coverage, you had a bit of a preview of this. While our staff worked until the early morning hours to share results on our website, social media platforms and newsletters, traditional print subscribers didn’t see that coverage until Thursday, two days after election night. But subscribers who opened the eEdition on Wednesday morning had result stories in the Extra Extra edition, along with the latest results from around the country.
We’re excited to roll out this new feature, and as we do, we hope to get your feedback. If you’re a subscriber who hasn’t yet activated your eEdition, you can do that at centredaily.com/activate.
Thank you for reading, supporting local journalism, and coming with us through steps of our evolution. If you have questions or concerns about the change in weekend delivery or upcoming dynamic eEdition, please contact me at jmcallister@centredaily.com or 814-231-4617.
