A Narrower Paper And A Bigger Question

By Editor | January 14, 2026 |

DAVE’S WORLD
By David Howell

We received a lot of good feedback about the paper redesign last week, along with a couple of responses from folks who are resistant to change. Truthfully, I understand that. I’m the same way. Newspaper people are notorious for not changing.
Melody, whose job description at the North Mississippi Herald includes graphic artist, worked on the redesign for several weeks. She put a lot of time into it with one goal in mind — to make folks more apt to pick up the paper and read it. Readership, after all, is essential for survival.

Little did we know that this week’s edition would look different again, and this time it was not by choice. No, your eyes aren’t deceiving you, the paper is a little narrower this week.

Monday afternoon, I received a call from Mark Dozier at the Tupelo Daily Journal, our printer. They are out of 24-inch newsprint, and it will likely be several weeks before their stock is replenished. That left us with one option: use 22-inch newsprint.
We didn’t have time to rework our entire format, which means the page size was proportionately reduced, kind of like shrinking a document on a copy machine. As part of that overall reduction, the fonts appear a little smaller as well.

According to our printer, the issue traces back to cold weather in Canada. Paper production is energy-intensive, and during extreme winter conditions, mills may be asked by utilities to reduce output or may slow operations to manage power use and protect equipment.

What makes disruptions like this show up so quickly is that the newsprint business no longer keeps much inventory. Printers don’t warehouse months of supply. Newspapers don’t have extra rolls sitting around just in case. The system runs close to real time now, and when one link slows down, the ripple moves fast.

What complicates matters further is that our printer relied on Domtar in Grenada, which closed its newsprint operation last fall. That mill was a major supplier of newsprint for printers serving community newspapers across the Southeast and the country. For years, papers like ours depended on it without ever giving much thought to where the paper itself came from.

There is an added layer of irony there. While newspapers across the region counted on Domtar, the mill was also a major employer close to home. Many of the workers affected by the closure live in Yalobusha County and surrounding areas. The loss didn’t just tighten the newsprint supply — it hit families, paychecks and a communities. The mill also purchased pine trees grown in Yalobusha County, providing a steady market for local landowners and loggers.

That closure removed the last domestic newsprint source available to our printer and, according to industry contacts, possibly one of the last U.S. mills supplying traditional newsprint to community papers.

Now that is a heck of a note — newspapers in the United States dependent on weather in Canada for the availability of newsprint. All of this comes as the price of newsprint continues to climb, even as fewer papers are printed and fewer pages are used. It’s one of the odd realities of the business right now: newspapers may be getting smaller, but the paper itself keeps costing more.

For the next few weeks, expect the newspaper to be a little shorter. That may be temporary. Or it may not. The supply of 22-inch newsprint appears to be more available, and this may end up becoming a permanent change.

Community papers across the country are making similar adjustments as they try to balance cost, tradition, the simple act of getting a paper printed each week and, frankly, surviving.

There was a time when newspapers felt permanent, as fixed as the courthouse or the water tower. Same size. Same feel. Same rhythm. And that brings me to a bigger question.

Is “normal” no longer a word in our vocabulary?

Posted in Archived Stories