3,000 circ semiweekly closes office

No, the newspaper itself is not closing, but?

The Copperas Cove Leader-Press, a semiweekly with more than 3,000 circulation per the Texas Press Association's 2025 annual, in a city of more than 35,000, is closing its office and having its staff work remotely. Yes, I know you share Coryell County with Gatesville, and a bit of Killeen intrudes from Bell County, and it covers the Hood, now Fort Cavazos, theoretically more than you do, but still. (Killeen and Temple are still run "shipshape" by the Mayborn family, and interestingly, Temple actually has a higher circulation. That said, a fair chunk of Killeen's population is transients, solders on duty at the Hood and their families.)

More serious sidebar while I'm here? It's Fort Cavazos and Fuck Trump. (And, per Wiki, don't pee on my leg and tell me it's raining by claiming it wasn't a naming reversion but that it was renamed after Col. Robert Hood.)

Sadly, and back to journalism, Belton's down to weekly. 

I could see moving to a smaller office rather than their current/previous one, where they had been for 15 years, per the October edition of TPA's Messenger, but shutting entirely?

It's cheap and it smacks to me of "we don't care."

(That said? It looks like one full-time news writer besides the editor, a freelancer who does some news and a little sports, and the publisher doing other sports that's not canned copy. And, that's with the publisher also listed as ad director. Sounds awfully thin on staff, even these days, for a paper that size. And, looking at the website, it looks like they kind of have written off sports coverage.) 

And, if I'm a staffer? Am I being compensated with this savings of, let's say, $1,500 a month with a salary adjustment, for higher-speed internet at home if needed, or for a younger staffer, any internet at home versus having just doomscrolled a smartphone? Additional electricity for summer daytime AC? Hah. Tis to laugh. I'm probably being told that I am saving gas mileage money and I should be grateful my salary isn't being cut.

What if you're the ME and don't even live in the Cove? Maybe you're in Killeen. Or Gatesville. Or Lampasas. 

 I say this in part over worry my current owner might think of this here. 

Southern Newspapers sells Lawton Constitution

 It's probably at least 5 years too late, if not 6 or 7, per what I wrote in 2019 about Southern's takeover, but at least it's out of Southern's least-common-denominator, story-number-counting, vulturous clutches.

 Best of luck to the new owners, who, kind of like Ballantine Communications in the Colorado portion of the Four Corners, and now in New Mexico as well, began as a telecommunications company, then acquired the Durango and Cortez papers, then went into New Mexico for Farmington, are now entering the media biz themselves. 

Hilliary had formed a media group within the company several years ago, and had already started a business-based paper in Lawton.

Southern? Per this Facebook post, even if you take it not just with one, but several, grains of salt, the Constitution had gone way downhill. I wonder if Hilliary was paying for much more than remaining subscriber and advertiser lists.

I don't know how new Wiki's circ numbers are, but what it lists is less than half of the 2018 numbers. Even with current newspaper decline rates, that's a bigger slump than normal. Perhaps it was "aided" by Hilliary's Southwest Ledger.

Once again, not getting the Gainesville Register

 Gainesville, Texas, approximately 17,000, is the county seat of Cooke County, approximately 45,000.

The paper is CHNI. Nuff ced?

Current editorial staff is an in-house staff writer, and a regional editor, with originally a sports background, running three CNHI papers. Weatherford is about 75 miles away, generally southwest. Cleburne is about 45 miles southeast of it. Weatherford has gotten so bad that a weekly halfway between it and Fort Worth started an online-only competitor. Nuff ced?

The only in-depth sports coverage the paper had in the entire 24-25 school year was of the football state championship game for Muenster, at the western edge of the county. Muenster has its own newspaper, let us note!

So far, this year the same, until the last two weeks, when some freelancer has reported on one game each week from two non-Muenster smaller schools.

But, Gainesville is nearly 40 percent of the county's population and you can't get anybody to cover Gainesville high school sports?

OK.

That may also say something about Gainesville sports fandom, I'll admit.