As you have seen in recent weeks, The News Courier has committed itself to bringing you the most up-to-date coverage on the coronavirus pandemic and how our community is surviving and coming together to get through this unprecedented time. Our staff has been working all hours of the day to look at every angle of the pandemic’s effect in our community.

The News Courier, as a business and as your neighbor, has provided constant coverage of the COVID-19 effects on our local community as well as information on how to stay healthy at home, who is stepping up to provide essentials and where and how to get assistance if you need it — and we’ve made it all for free online as we realize the importance of this information for our community during this uncertain time.

We are committed to keeping our community informed. However, The News Courier has not been immune to the hardships brought on by the coronavirus pandemic, and we are having to make our own operational changes to survive.

The sudden loss of ad revenue has been detrimental to our small business, and we are having to take steps to reduce some of our costs while continuing to provide you the same coverage.

Beginning next week, The News Courier will reduce and change our print publication days to Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday.

Although we are eliminating one print publication day, we will continue to have relevant new stories of interest online every day of the week in a timely fashion. All coronavirus-related stories will continue to be free for online readers.

In our community’s time of need, we are continuing to step up and provide critical information even as our own future is uncertain. We have a landing page at enewscourier.com/covid-19 with the latest local, state and national reporting on the topic. We are posting all COVID-19 news and items as breaking news, which provides access without charge to online readers, regardless of subscription status.

Where public safety is involved, we wish to remove barriers.

We have seen substantial increases in our web traffic, so we know this information is vital to you, too. We thank our subscribers and advertisers for continuing to support their neighbors at The News Courier and our mission to serve our community.

We ask all readers to please consider supporting us by subscribing. You can subscribe for less than $10 per month at enewscourier.com/subscriptions or by calling 256-232-2720. Our office at 410 W. Green St. in Athens is temporarily closed to in-person traffic, but our staff will be available to answer your phone calls between 8 a.m. and 4:30 p.m. Mondays through Fridays.

Wishing everyone good health and safety,

Lora Scripps, Managing Editor

and Katherine Miller, Publisher