The Gainesville Daily Register is no longer daily

At least not in its print version.

Starting today, the former five-day daily has moved to triweekly.

On the surface, it's a coronavirus ding, but realistically, at a minimum, it had needed to trim two pages a day even at continued five-day daily existence.

Fluffing one classy page into two? Derp.

Running non-emergency press releases on the front page, one a staff of editor, staff writer and sports guy and that's it? No bueno.

Sulphur Springs, where I was at before, in a city 95 percent the size of Gainesville and county 85 percent the size, went from six-day to triweekly 18 months ago. It probably could have stepped down to five-day daily first; as I've said before, I think making the smallest stepdown in print publication as needed is always the best choice. But it had as good or better an ad percentage as Gainesville.

Before that, and largely due to publishing screw-ups by former owner Granite, Mount Pleasant went from five-day to semiweekly. Mount Pleasant the same size as Sulphur Springs, though in a county a full 20 percent smaller than Hood County.

Its closest sister CNHI paper, the Greenville Herald Banner, sliced from six days down to five a while back. It was some time after I left Sulphur Springs, but pre-coronavirus, I believe.

I know this is a coronavirus move, but I'm sure it will be permanent. Per all that I've said above, I think a lot of area readers are surprised it still has been a five-day.

But, it is a CNHI paper. While Craphouse and others are overreactive to their vulture capitalist overlords, CNHI, besides the long-ago quarterly furloughs, has appeared content to drift. In the case of Gainesville, with a fair sized six-day daily to the east only 30 miles, a six-day daily not much further north than that in Oklahoma, and a seven-day daily to the south, their only real room for expansive coverage was west, but they only did a lot of that on sports.*

* Unfortunately, while it's a triweekly in print, it still has CNHI stupidity. When it trimmed pages 2-3 weeks ago, it cut to one page of classys. It's now running two again, though the April 16 issue only needed one. And it's running TV guide pages still. A 12-page paper that could have been eight.

April 21 Tuesday? NO non-house ads (counting CNHI-connected Alabama golf course ads as "house") and NO non-public service ads (Texas Press Association 1st Amendment ad) in the paper, and 1.25 pages of classys that could have been shrunk or something, on a 10-pager.

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I take no joy in their cutbacks at the local level. Nor do I take joy in CNHI's administration of most of its newspapers.

That said, as I noted months ago, in the most recent round of acquisitions Twister, nobody wanted CNHI. I presume that the Alabama pension system obligations as a boat anchor are part of the reason. Well, nobody is really going to want CNHI now. Many of its non-dailies are likely to just close in the next six months, I guess.