More fun with the Gainesville Register

 First, it raised its print prices again, to $1.25 Tuesday and $1.75 Friday. Seriously, is anybody paying that? And, did your subscription prices go up with that?

Second, its editor is trying to get started, not an editorial board in the normal sense, but a community feedback board. It would probably start with "more local news." Of course, when you're not at all local meetings, and the Weekly News of Cooke County runs all the courthouse stuff (divorces, criminal pleas, police report, etc.) and you don't, you're sledding uphill, and the Register has been, as far as I can tell, since I started as ME at a pair of area weeklies more than three years ago.

But, that said, second part two? You've got both an editor and a staff writer, and you can't do that? And, you need the public to tell you more of what that "more" should be?

Part three. The new staff writer is a 2020 non-journalism college graduate. And, hometown person. Nothing wrong with either. 

But? Her actual degree? Education, with a teaching certificate. So, she either discovered that, mid-COVID, she didn't want to teach in today's education system, or, for whatever reason, she couldn't land a position. She was a church office manager before that. Again, nothing wrong with that. Before I landed on newspapers as the only reasonably available professional job in a place smaller than Gainesville, I did stuff that didn't pay well and was lower on the socioeconomic job scale than that. But, college was a lot less expensive decades ago.

Part the fourth, back to part 1. Your paper would be 8 pages on Tuesday, maybe 10 on Friday, without all the syndicated filler that your dumb-ass bosses at CNHI are probably still running in all your papers, even though they all stopped being daily in print long ago. So, you're charging $1.25 for an eight-page paper and $1.75 for a 10-pager? The Weekly News, as a semi-shopper, remains free. Among paid papers in this area, Wise County and Bowie are still a flat buck an issue with half again as many pages as you actually have, not what you nominally have.

If the Weekly News scraped up the money to hire your sports editor, or even a half-time sports guy, school year only, you'd be dead.

Or, if somebody started running more legals in another newspaper of general circulation ... that's all that props up the Register today.