Major change coming to Blackfoot Valley Dispatch

Next month the Blackfoot Valley Dispatch is making a change to our publication schedule due to a recent increase in our mailing costs an upcoming increase in our printing costs and declines in advertising revenue

Beginning Oct. 7, the BVD will change from publishing an issue every week to publishing biweekly (every other week), on Thursdays.

The decision wasn't easy to make and wasn't made lightly. It certainly wasn't what we had in mind when we bought the BVD nine-and-a-half years ago, but we decided it is our best bet for keeping the newspaper in production, while still providing Lincoln with award-winning coverage.

The truth is that, currently, we can't survive as a weekly publication. In the last few years social media has increasingly become the go to platform for local businesses and organizations to advertise and share information. Last year, we had plans to address that disparity, but the rigors of weekly publication with our small staff meant we couldn't invest the necessary time and energy into exploring better ways of doing business in an industry that has changed dramatically in the last decade.

We hope the new production schedule will provide us with more time and flexibility to produce better stories and to find ways to improve our online presence in terms of advertising possibilities and breaking news, while still producing a physical newspaper that so many of our readers prefer.

Historically the BVD began as a twice-monthly paper and remained so for the first dozen or so years of its existence, so we consider this as something of a reset.

At the moment, we can't say if the BVD will remain a bi-weekly paper indefinitely, or if it will return to weekly publication at some point. We do know that we make our decision with known risks and with challenges we can't yet foresee, but we certainly hope both our readers and our advertisers will stick with us.

Given the number of times people share images of the ads and stories in our printed newspaper on Facebook, we still whole heartedly believe that BVD advertising remains the best form of advertising in Lincoln, and that your local newspaper is still the single best way to get information out to the community.