I’ve been in the business of providing coverage of the news, sports and lots of other happenings in Jackson County for nearly 40 years.

I spent the first two years of my career covering sports for The Banner in Brownstown and later joined the staff of The Tribune in August 1989 as a correspondent covering sports before becoming the full-time staff photographer a few months later.

A lot about the newspaper business has changed since I first moved to Jackson County to become a journalist back in 1986.

At The Banner — and yes that’s what it was called back then, not The Brownstown Banner — we typed our stories on a typewriter, but at least it was an electric one.

Before I moved to The Tribune, we had started using one of those new-fangled computers and have been in a race ever since to keep up with the changing technology that brought us pagination, digital photography and so much more.

We’re undergoing a big change today since we will no longer be printing a paper six days a week — just Wednesdays and Saturdays.

That doesn’t mean the staff of The Tribune plans to stop covering the everyday happenings in Jackson County.

You’ll still see our reporters, Zach Spicer, Erika Malone, Lew Freedman and myself, along with sports editor Dakota Locker and sports reporter Arv Koontz interviewing people, taking photos and writing stories, and they will be posted online on tribtown.com as fast as we can get them fit for publication.

A lot of the regular features, including the record book, will be updated daily and on weekends on tribtown.com. Within the past few days, we have added AP News and AP Sports feeds to tribtown.com to help our readers keep up with events around the country and world.

And on the days when there is a print edition, there also will be an E-Edition of The Tribune.

Speaking of the print editions, if one of the features you always followed is not showing, let us know by calling 812-522-4871 or email [email protected]. We will see about bringing it back.

There will likely be some changes when it comes to what stories and features make it into the print editions on Wednesdays and Saturdays. We will still plan to print the arrests, marriages, dissolutions, real estate disclosures and other regular items.

Two pages of Wednesday’s edition also will be set aside for The Banner, which will no longer be a separate entity. Some of the poplar features that have appeared in it, including Looking Back, Dick Wolfsie’s column, Lovina’s Amish Kitchen, Trackside and the news from Kurtz and Russell Chapel, will still show up on those pages.

And we’re also going to be adding something similar to Looking Back called On This Day in the Saturday edition of The Tribune, and Throwback Thursday is going to become Way Back Wednesday.

I always knew this day was coming and have been saying the same for quite some time now.

And no, I don’t have any psychic powers. It wasn’t hard to foretell it as advertising revenue and subscribers have continued to fall dramatically over the years.

Just take a look at today’s edition. It hasn’t been that many years ago that Saturday’s edition would contain inserts from several companies. Those days are long gone.

That decline has led to fewer journalists in newsrooms across the country and fewer newsrooms for that matter. As case in point, when I started at The Tribune, we had a newsroom of more than a dozen people, and now, it has been reduced to less than half that number.

According to The State of Local News 2022 report, the total number of journalists working at local newspaper organizations is estimated to have fallen by roughly 60% since 2005 to 31,400. Newspaper closures since 2004 have averaged out to two a week.

The line between a weekly and a daily has become blurred as many dailies have gone to publishing either electronically or in print three or fewer times a week.

There is still a need for local news coverage, and we intend to provide it for many years to come.

Aubrey Woods is editor of The Tribune. Send comments to [email protected].