By: E&P Staff Despite its name, the Palo Alto (Calif.) Weekly has really been a twice-weekly publication since March 1993 when it increased frequency to fill the void from the folding of the old daily Peninsula Times Tribune.
Starting Sept. 26, however, the Wednesday and Friday editions will be combined into a single paper published on Fridays.
In a posting on its Web site, Weekly Publisher Bill Johnson said the paper will also launch an electronic edition, "Express" that will be e-mailed out Mondays through Fridays.
The Friday print edition will combine the news-oriented content of the Weekly's Wednesday editions with the current Friday "Weekend" edition's focus on arts and entertainment, Johnson said.
He added that the print savings of combining days was not the chief reason for the move.
"Like all newspapers, we are reducing our costs wherever we can during this economic downturn," Johnson said. "But these new initiatives reflect our long-term view of how we can best serve the needs of our readers and advertisers."
The move has been in the planning for more than a year after marketing surveys "clearly showed that residents are increasingly obtaining their local news, sports and event information on a daily basis from Palo Alto Online, and had a preference for one print edition per week instead of two," Johnson said.
The free Weekly has a distribution of about 37,000, and estimates its readership at 70,000. It says its Palo Alto Online averages more than 120,000 unique visitors and a 500,000 page views each month.
"As residents increasingly prefer to turn to the Web for up-to-the-minute news and information, it makes less and less sense to incur the enormous effort, expense and environmental impact of printing and transporting newspapers to readers," Johnson said.
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