Adapting to change, close to home

For the first time in my adult life there will be no newspaper at the end of my driveway this weekend.

By Yvonne Mintz, TPA president 2026-27

No, I didn’t cancel my subscription to the newspaper I publish. And I didn’t suddenly decide to be an online-only reader. I have long enjoyed the ease of reading online our E-edition and other newspapers I subscribe to, but I still flip through the hard copy, partly to check print quality and just because it feels right to me.

There will be no newspaper at the end of my driveway because our circulation department simply can’t find a reliable carrier or justify the economics of delivery to my route any longer.

Brazoria County is massive, and the town where I live, Rosharon, is growing but sparsely populated when compared to the expanse it occupies. It takes me 30 minutes to get to work, which I quite enjoy. I love the feeling of getting away from the city when I head to the house. I have neighbors, but I can’t smell what they cooked for dinner or hear them yelling at their kids — usually.

The very things that make our unincorporated area so appealing are the things that make dependable newspaper delivery a challenge. To be honest, we should have made the change to online or mail delivery for this route years ago. But I couldn’t bring myself to face that reality until this month, when my circulation director came to me with a problem. She had been running the route herself, and it became clear to her that the economics of the route are such that we can’t keep a carrier there for long, particularly with fuel prices as high as they are.

We pulled the route list, identified nine or so subscribers we could move to adjoining routes and wrote a letter to the rest to inform them we would move them to either online-only or to delivery by mail. I even invited these couple of dozen readers to bring their devices to the office for us to get their online accounts established and show them the ease of use and what they’re missing by not reading online.

I know this change will affect their routines. None of us enjoy that. I also know we won’t persuade them all to move online. But until we come up with a better option, perhaps like bulk delivery to a coded box, this is what we can do.

Running a media organization in 2026 is a series of hard choices — balancing our obligations to readers with our employees’ and contractors’ needs and the newspaper’s bottom line. We have all made decisions like this that break our hearts in ways big and small.

It’s important, though, that we don’t see change as a dirty word in our industry. Everything in life changes. It is meant to. Some organizations have closed their presses, moved offices, converted to online-only delivery across the board, changed hands, or merged with other papers.

Some have gained websites, video, podcasts or e-newsletters — things publishers could not have imagined a generation or two ago. I remember in the early days of websites thinking that a print newspaper would never be replaced by computers. Newspapers, I said, were portable.  You can’t fold a computer, put it under your arm and take it on the bus, I thought.

Well, I never claimed to have a crystal ball, and that will teach me to try to predict the future.

There is plenty of good news, though. Adaptation in an evolving world makes our industry more resilient. The courage to change shows our commitment to the future.

I’m lucky. I have access to many print newspaper titles at work, The Facts included. The majority of our coverage area will continue to have print newspaper delivery. I’ll keep reading the online versions of several newspapers I subscribe to, and can get my newsprint-and-ink fix any day of the week.

We’ll keep innovating because our mission is too important for us to wither on the vine. Besides, who knows what great newspaper tools we’ll find, once we loosen our grip on the old ones and embrace the new?

Yvonne Mintz is publisher of The Facts in Brazoria County, vice president for content of Southern Newspapers Inc. and president of the Texas Press Association. Email Yvonnne.Mintz@thefacts.com