Welcome to the new and improved Sunday Journal.

This is an exciting time as The Journal continues to reinvent itself in this ever-changing information age and right now, you are holding the first step in that new direction.

Each Saturday morning, you are going to receive the Sunday Journal you’ve come to love and count on over the years, but just a day earlier … and a lot bigger.

While the ordinary Sunday paper typically featured 16-18 pages, today’s tops out at 30. That may be a couple pages bigger than normal moving forward because we are excited about this change and wanted the first edition to look extra good … but you can count on all those things you read Saturday’s paper for, including the TV and History pages, showing up in Sunday’s.

This change will also be a huge benefit to our advertisers, who will get their highly sought-after Sunday inserts delivered to their customers one day earlier, while at the same time, the Sunday paper will be read for two days instead of one.

And of course, there are many carriers who are looking forward to getting a day off once in a while. My son delivers a route I accompany him on through the week and I can assure you, seven days a week is a grind.

For the reader, we will continue our efforts to provide 24-hour news coverage of not just of New Ulm but all of Brown County and beyond. We will continue to update our website, www.nujournal.com, throughout the weekend as well as our Facebook page.

Our website. Our Facebook page. It’s easy to write or speak quickly about those things as if they have always existed. But we know they didn’t. In fact, they didn’t when I started working in this industry more than 25 years ago. (Coincidentally, it was just about that time The Journal expanded to its current seven-day-a-week format due to local market changes.)

But the world has changed again. It usually does. And so now we have the Internet, Facebook, Twitter, SnapChat, Instagram, and 82 other apps that I’m completely unfamiliar with and a 6-day-a-week newspaper that all have one thing in common: The ability to share information.

We are in the midst of the information age, and providing that is something The Journal specifically and newspapers in general have been doing for … well … centuries. So its only appropriate that in the midst of the information age, with so many emerging ways to share information, that newspapers change along with the rest of the world.

On the downside, New Ulm loses a novelty as we definitely were the smallest community in Minnesota and possibly the country with a 7-day-a-week paper. For comparison, the next smallest is Mankato, population 40,000. Other towns with 7-day-a-week publications include Duluth, Minneapolis, St. Cloud and St. Paul. That’s a small list of a lot of big cities.

But that’s okay. New Ulm has lots of other oddities that are more fun and novel, all with stories worth telling. And we are going to keep doing that here at The Journal for centuries to come.

——

Gregory Orear is the publisher of The Journal. His award-winning weekly column, “What’s Going On,” has been published in four newspapers in three states for more than 20 years. He can be contacted at gorear@nujournal.com.