START THE PRESSES!

Welcome to The Herald-Mail

October 01, 2007|By ANDREW SCHOTZ

HAGERSTOWN - Two daily newspapers have become one today.

The Morning Herald and The Daily Mail, which each served Washington County and beyond for more than 100 years, are now The Herald-Mail.

The 179-year-old Daily Mail and the 134-year-old Morning Herald each printed their last editions on Friday.

The Herald-Mail Co. and its parent company, Schurz Communications Inc., merged the two papers into a morning edition because of declining evening readership - which fits a nationwide trend - and to devote more attention to digital news operations, which are growing rapidly, Publisher John League said.

League said many readers were satisfied when they heard that the price of the paper would stay the same and all of the comic strips would be retained.

The Morning Herald and The Daily Mail printed different strips on their comics pages. All of those strips now will be found in the weekday editions of The Herald-Mail.

Newspaper management has promised to include all the other features from each paper in the new combined paper.

"I really think it makes sense to put the best of both papers together," League said.

Executive Editor Terry Headlee said the weekday Herald-Mail will expand by four pages to accommodate those features.

Without an evening paper, The Herald-Mail Co. is reconfiguring its newsroom to work more on electronic components of journalism, particularly the Web site, he said.

"We are becoming more of an information center," Headlee said.

For the last 25 years, the combined editions of The Herald and The Mail have been printed on Saturday and on Sunday as The Herald-Mail.

Hagerstown was one of only six cities in the country that still had a morning newspaper and an afternoon paper published by the same company, according to Editor & Publisher magazine's 2005 newspaper encyclopedia and Herald-Mail research.

Today, that number drops to five.

The encyclopedia and Herald-Mail research show that another six cities have what is known as a joint operating agreement between a morning paper and an evening paper; the papers are editorially separate, but combine their business operations.

|

|

|