• by Fern Siegel , October 24, 2019

Two more McClatchy newspapers are cutting one of their print days.

As of January 25, 2020, The News Tribune (Tacoma, Washington) and its sister paper The Olympian, (Olympia, Washington) will cease publishing on Saturday.

The trend isn’t new in the industry; readers have been migrating to online news sites for years.

Both West Coast newspapers date from the 1880s.

In place of its Saturday edition, The News Tribune and The Olympian will launch a Weekend Edition that includes expanded coverage on Friday and Sunday.

Those features usually printed on Saturday — comics, puzzles, TV listings — will appear in the Weekend Edition.

Any breaking local news will be filed to their respective online and social-media platforms. Both publications offer an eEdition, which resembles a printed paper on the web.

Rebecca Poynter, president-publisher of The News Tribune, called the move “a strategic change to invest in our future.”

Two weeks ago, McClatchy announced it would stop printing the Saturday edition of the Fresno Bee and the Modesto Bee as of January 11. Friday and Sunday print editions will be enlarged, while Saturday will be digital-only.

“We’ve built a solid tech platform for digital journalism and are focused on serving digital advertisers,” Tim Ritchey, publisher of The Fresno Bee, told the Fresno Business Journal.

Other McClatchy newspapers to cancel their Saturday edition include The Durham Herald Sun (Durham, North Carolina), The Myrtle Beach Sun News (Myrtle Beach, South Carolina), The Wichita Eagle (Wichita, Kansas) and The Bellingham Herald (Bellingham, Washington).