News Leader changing how newspapers are delivered to improve efficiency, service

With the arrival of September, we're making some changes in how the print newspaper gets to your doorstep.

Starting this week, we have a different company printing the newspaper each night and have contracted with those same folks to deliver our newspapers to our readers each night.

The end goal is efficiency and the change lets us keep all of our focus on our readers and advertising customers.

It's been more than a decade since we printed our own newspapers down on Central Avenue. At some point during the Great Recession, we decided we could stake out our future as printers or as journalists and the community's information provider. We had to focus our resources and attention, we decided not to be printers. So, just as it was in the earliest days of Leader Publishing, we contracted with another newspaper in the area to do our press work.

Now, we're taking it a step further. Since our new printer - Lee Enterprises - already has a fleet of drivers criss-crossing the area every night delivering several other publications, including our sister publication USA TODAY, it made sense to move our delivery into the same system.

Unlike what some folks have speculated, we're still part of The USA TODAY Network, still owned by Gannett, the largest newspaper company in the United States, and still deeply committed to tell our community's story, in print and online.

We've been hiring reporters and enhancing our journalism, certainly with an eye to our growing digital presence, but also benefitting the print subscriber. We have placed a greater emphasis on the topics you've told us matter, and the deeper work it requires to tell a story properly.

Our journalists work damn hard — and I hope you see and value their hustle.

What is changing is the way we carry a printed copy of this journalism to your home. For decades, we've sent motor carriers all over two cities and a county and some outlying areas to your box or doorstep. It's akin to delivering thousands of pizzas every day of the year without stopping, in every kind of weather, albeit with the advantage of not having to keep the cheese hot.

I really appreciate what our carrier workforce has done for so long to do this often thankless job.

But the economics of the media business have changed, and it no longer made sense to make all these trips when someone else was also driving these routes in their car to deliver a paper like The Washington Post.

I look forward to the improvements they are going to make along the way in the quality of service. This is the company which runs The Daily Progress, the Richmond Times-Dispatch and the small paper in Waynesboro called The News-Virginian.

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The efficiency of having all these papers in the same cars and routes means that we will preserve time and investment in the reporting we do, the journalism you care about. Our work is unmatched in quality in the Shenandoah Valley and to keep it that way, we have centered more and more of our business on news research, interviewing your neighbors and telling great stories.

We also will be able to help the environment by cutting down on so many road miles!

Our carriers had the chance to interview with Lee and so in some spots it might even be the same person bringing you the paper as before. The switch officially starts Sept. 1.

We also have switched to use Lee's printing operation in Lynchburg. Previously, we printed for years at The Daily News-Record in Harrisonburg.

Thank you for reading, and we hope you stick with us as we make this logistical transition.

— William Ramsey is the Executive Editor of The News Leader and the Southeast Central region of the USA TODAY Network, across several papers in West Virginia, Virginia and North Carolina. He lives in Waynesboro.

This article originally appeared on Staunton News Leader: News Leader changing carriers for home delivery for efficiency, improved service