BRATTLEBORO — As has been our custom for years, The Commons will not publish the last week of the year.
And in related news, we will be doing this sort of thing a little more frequently in 2020.
Starting in the spring, we will publish four issues per month. On months with five Wednesdays, the paper will not publish that fifth issue. That means that in 2020, no paper will be published April 29, July 29, Sept. 23, and Dec. 30.
This scheduling will allow us, with the cooperation of our regular advertisers, to shift advertising that would have gone into those issues and help bolster our special sections and special projects. If plans fall into place as we think, we will be able to offer you some heftier papers in the remaining 47 issues in 2020 while optimizing our printing costs.
More importantly, our staff members have had only one week off per year for almost a decade. As we enter our second decade of publishing weekly, we simply can't continue producing the newspaper you need without a more humane approach to what we can reasonably expect from our employees.
We hope that this additional downtime will also let us begin to introduce new features and functionality to our website, improve its performance, and augment our social media presence.
We expect that we will evaluate the effectiveness of this schedule as we put it into practice. As always, we need to balance our resources with how best we can serve our community's needs.
As for our next issue, dated Wednesday, Jan. 1, 2020, it will go to press on Tuesday, Dec. 31 and will be distributed one day early.
All of us at The Commons wish our readers a safe and happy holiday season. -Jeff Potter, editor