With COVID-19 altering our lives, all of us continue to alter how we do things. Starting this week, as the dual nameplates at the top of this page signify, we are uniting these two great publications into a single publication.

The news team is busier than ever keeping you informed; however, despite the increased demand for news, our primary source of income, advertising, has decreased dramatically. So, we must adjust too. We are continuing to look at ways we can reduce our costs and maintain critical operations. We, like all of you, hope this is temporary and that we can get back to normal soon.

How does this save money? Each section is a press run. Each section requires pagination, set-up, run-time, paper, ink, inserting and more. By combining, we reduce our press run by a section. We reduce our costs considerably and can bring you a larger paper providing news coverage of more of the region.

There were several scenarios we considered. However, this one made the most sense for the near term. After all, our staff, the same staff, produces both publications each week, so why not consolidate their effort into one publication?

Besides the combining of news on page 1, we have moved our editorial page (combined material) from page 2 to deeper inside the 12-page front section. We have also combined the sports and education news. Boothbay Register news appears on pages 2-5 and Wiscasset Newspaper news is grouped on pages 8-10. Due to press configurations, we have to print in black and white in the middle four pages of the front section. The back section will remain the same as always.

Prior to the establishment of the Wiscasset Newspaper in the late 1960s, the Boothbay Register used to publish some Wiscasset news in its weekly edition. So we’ve kind of come full circle.

Thank you, to you, our readers. We hope you will be pleased with this combined approach during these changed times.