Four Iowa newspapers owned by Lee Enterprises announced on May 21 that beginning next month, they will produce print editions only three days a week.

The Sioux City Journal, Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier, Mason City Globe-Gazette, and Council Bluffs Daily Nonpareil previewed the changes in Sunday editorials. Journal editor Bruce Miller’s column was headlined, “Changes ahead in Journal content, distribution.” Doug Hines, who serves as editor for both the Courier and Globe-Gazette, and Rachel George of the Daily Nonpareil announced the move with none-too-convincing optimism about an “expanded” newspaper “coming soon.”

Starting on June 20, each paper will produce a print edition on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. Subscribers to the Courier, Globe-Gazette, and Journal will receive the papers through the U.S. Postal Service, rather than delivered to their doorstep. Miller advised, “If you routinely read the print product early in the morning (and your mail doesn’t arrive until the afternoon), you may want to get in the habit of looking at the paper on your cellphone, your tablet or your computer. It’s news when you want it.”

The editorial in the Nonpareil didn’t mention a shift away from traditional delivery.

The three print editions will be larger than the current daily papers. Hines, Miller, and George promised “more content, more sections and more pages.”

Every print day, you’ll have a “Sunday” reading experience that’s bursting with local news and opinions, investigative and watchdog journalism, personalities and profiles, sports stories that take you beyond the results of a game played a day or two ago, and a deeper look at the businesses and market leaders in our community and the world around us. […] Our new print editions are going to engage you like never before.

Miller told readers, “By switching to this model, we’re able to do more in-depth and investigative stories, profiles and opinion pieces. You’ll find those extras online – and in those three supersized print papers.”

The papers will continue to publish online editions seven days a week, which will mirror the print editions on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. Print subscriptions include access to the newspaper’s e-editions, website, and app. But not everyone who enjoys reading the paper has an internet connection or a smartphone.

Pat Kinney, a longtime Courier reporter and editor who now writes the View from the Cedar Valley Substack newsletter, noted in his post about the changes, “The Courier, for generations, has published a print edition daily except for Saturday; it experimented briefly with a Saturday edition in the early 2000s. The Globe-Gazette has printed Tuesday through Sunday since the late 2000s.”

The Nonpareil has also been printing newspapers on Tuesday through Sunday, while the Journal has produced five print editions a week (Wednesday through Sunday) since 2020.

The Quad-City Times—the largest of Lee’s six Iowa newspapers—still prints a paper every day, and does not appear to be planning any change to that schedule.

Lee publications have gone through several rounds of layoffs in recent years. In 2022, the company fended off a takeover attempt by Alden Global Capital. Employees at some Lee newspapers, including the Courier and Globe-Gazette, were forced to choose this year between a two-week, unpaid furlough or a salary cut.

Moving to three print days a week will save the affected papers money on newsprint, but it won’t insulate them from the broader trends affecting the profitability of journalism. Most newspapers have seen steep declines in circulation over the past decade, and online subscriptions haven’t produced nearly enough revenue to offset those losses. A smaller footprint in the community makes it harder to sell advertising. Whether locally owned or part of a big national chain, many businesses now prefer to spend their ad dollars on Google or Facebook.

The collapse in advertising revenue is also a huge problem for news organizations that publish exclusively online. Buzzfeed recently shut down its entire award-winning news division. Vox Media laid off 7 percent of its staff early this year, and Vice Media filed for bankruptcy last week. Margaret Sullivan wrote in The Guardian,

The problem in digital news? The audience, in many cases, was there. But the profits didn’t follow, or at least not in a sustainable way. Digital advertising revenue, once thought to be based on audience size, was going instead to social-media platforms, particularly Facebook.

Venture capitalists who had funded the news sites grew disenchanted and impatient.

As a lifelong newspaper reader, I’m always sad to see any cuts in print journalism. More than a year after the Des Moines Register stopped printing a Saturday edition, I still miss getting the newspaper on Saturdays.

But cuts to newsroom staff are more devastating to an organization than any change to a printing or delivery schedule. Here’s hoping the move to three print editions a week will keep Lee Enterprises from imposing more layoffs in Sioux City, Council Bluffs, Mason City, and the Cedar Valley.

UPDATE: Globe-Gazette news and photo editor Lisa Grouette raised an important point: this change is happening across many Lee newspapers, not just at the four Iowa properties discussed here. “While the shift to online is inevitable,” she tweeted, “it’s still a perfect example of why supporting local news is so important.”

Grouette also commented Sunday, “It’s my hope this will give our reporters a chance to spread their wings as writers and bring our readers more meaningful content. We’ll continue to bring you local + breaking news online, as it happens.”