In wake of print run cut, Daily Progress announces staff additions

“I want our readers and anyone in the community to know that we are listening,” says new Daily Progress editor Reynolds Hutchins.

The Daily Progress has been printed 7 days a week since 1968 and began its 6 day print run in 1892.

When the corporate owners of the Daily Progress, Lee Enterprises, announced the paper would only be printed three days a week beginning in June, and delivering via USPS, the reaction was predictably cynical. Local news readers have watched corporate publishers starve newsrooms, outsource operations, and buy and sell their newspapers with such regularity since the internet began disrupting the print advertising business model in the mid-1990s that it has become a colloquialism to complain about such things. To say nothing of the political polarization that has divided even local audiences in recent years, and opinions about their local paper and journalism itself. Indeed, a 2017 study about the local news industry published by the Columbia Journalism Review cited a pervasive "doom and gloom" narrative about local papers that needed to change if they were to survive.

However, judging by t…