The Daily Advance is shifting to two days a week for its print product.

The changeover from five days a week to two days a week — Wednesdays and Saturdays — takes effect Sept. 29.

Let that sink in a moment.

And The Daily Advance’s office has moved from that nondescript strip mall on Ehringhaus Street to the epicenter of news activity and the pulse of the community on Weeksville Road — the paper’s second move in about six years.

Change of address aside, let that shift from five days a week to two sink in for a moment.

The first question I’ve been asked: Is a daily newspaper truly a daily newspaper — after all, it’s in The Daily Advance’s name — if it’s not distributed daily?

Depends on who you ask. If there’s not a print product published every day, then no.

However, if the news is published online every day, then yes, it’s still a daily product. By that accounting, the Albemarle Observer is a daily newspaper, always has been.

Will subscription rates change?

From what I read in a story published Aug. 26 in The Daily Advance, there’s no mention of subscription prices changing or decreasing, nor any mention of a rebate or partial refund when the newspaper transitions from a five-day to a two-day print schedule on Sept. 29.

Daily newspapers near and far have been adjusting the frequency of their print products for some time now. In many places I travel, it’s become harder and harder to find a print newspaper on a rack or in a newspaper box. That’s nothing new. Many large metropolitan cities have transitioned from daily newspapers to once-a-week editions or even all-digital editions.

Digital is where it’s at and where it will stay, but in many places we’re not there yet in terms of digital revenue — not just locally but nationwide — so the revenue stream from print subscribers and advertisers is still important.

Moreover, whenever a media executive makes a cost-cutting decision to move toward digital, publishers packaged it as good news for consumers. Nonsense. That decision doesn’t account for the fact that not everyone — particularly in rural areas, and certainly in parts of Northeast North Carolina — has equal access to the internet. Many places are dead zones that need a print product. And honestly, there are people who don’t want to mess with logging in to digital newspapers and who loathe paywalls. When folks are forced to scale a paywall to read a single article every now and then, they quickly migrate to another media source — television, radio, the Albemarle Observer, or social media.

Applied further: If The Daily Advance is cutting print production to save money, how long before the local weeklies go all-digital — no more weekly newspapers in print? And really, we’re almost there now. Unless you know where to look, it’s hard to find a weekly on the racks or in boxes anywhere. More often than not, what’s in the print edition are stories that are at least a week old — and that’s if it arrives in the mail on time.

Question — how will local libraries capture and chronicle the digital age so that folks can look back at old editions, maybe to find an obituary or a birth announcement?

All that said, Elizabeth City is growing, and the same is true across Northeast North Carolina. The Daily Advance should be able to gain new subscribers and retain longtime, loyal ones. The same can be said for advertising — new health care providers, lots of new businesses — selling ads in this market should be a slam dunk, particularly if those ads are packaged within zoned markets across the region. But here we are.

I’ll tell you: small town newspapers don’t make a lot of money, but they’re necessary to the communities they serve. If it weren’t for legal ads — a kind of taxpayer subsidy — many of these newspapers would have disappeared long ago.

I’ve seen it happen time and again — when corporate media executives determine that the revenue stream from print and/or digital isn’t enough to sustain small town newspapers, those papers will close. Nationwide, when that happens, staff who aren’t laid off get moved from the “frontier” to the home office, leaving little to no coverage of rural areas and further expanding the news desert.

Because regional media outlets have pulled back, the Albemarle Observer has become the only media outlet for counties near and far across Northeast North Carolina.

Thanks go to our readers who’ve subscribed and donated to our mission to provide quality local journalism.

I’ll say it: Because the Albemarle Observer is dedicated to our communities, we cover the stories that matter here.

We’re independent — and that matters in an age of media conglomeration and propaganda.

We do our best to serve the community, whether that’s covering a town council meeting or walking the sidelines of a high school football game.

We care.

We care about our communities, the people and places across our rural region.

Thanks for your support!