Two Hagerstown daily newspapers announced plans over the weekend to merge into one amid ever-declining interest in afternoon editions.
The afternoon Daily Mail, which first went to press July 4, 1828, will cease publication Sept. 28 and merge with its sister paper founded in 1862, The Morning Herald.
Both publications are owned by Schurz Communications Inc. of South Bend, Ind., and they already share many resources, including advertising and news staff.
The combined paper, which is to make its debut Oct. 1 and publish in the morning, will be called The Herald-Mail.
"Afternoon readership has been elusive at nearly every afternoon paper in the United States because people no longer have time in the evening to read. Folks are too busy," Herald-Mail editor and publisher John League wrote in a column to readers Sunday explaining the decision.
Afternoon papers used to be the norm, outnumbering morning versions by four-to-one in 1950. But their numbers have steadily declined as lifestyles and schedules have changed and profits have declined.
The number of afternoon and evening newspapers has dropped by nearly 60 percent since 1950, down to 614 papers last year from 1,450 such papers a little more than a half-century ago. Many went out of business, while others - including The Evening Sun - were folded into sister morning papers.
Last year, there were 833 morning papers published in the United States, up from 322 a.m. dailies in 1950.
The Daily Mail lasted longer than many afternoon papers in part because it's a family-owned publication, and that's what the family wanted regardless of profit, said Charles Pittman, a senior vice president of publishing for Schurz.
"Hagerstown is one of the few towns with p.m. and a.m. papers," Pittman said. "We held on as long as we possibly could. We did that because we had family values that said we could do that."
The afternoon paper once had the higher circulation, but it has steadily lost readers where the morning version has gained them.
The Morning Herald, which is distributed in regions of Maryland, Pennsylvania and Delaware, has an average weekday circulation of 23,500, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations.
The Daily Mail, which is limited to Washington County distribution, has a circulation of about 11,700.
Now, its resources will be reallocated to the combined paper's Web site, which receives about 34,000 unique visits per day and more than 6.4 million page views per month.
"There are more people exposed through the Web site to our newspapers, to Herald-Mail products and information and advertisers than ever have been to" the print editions, League said in an interview. "The digital world has changed everything, and newspapers have to adapt."
League said that he expects that a handful of jobs will be eliminated as part of the merger, though he plans to offer alternate positions to many of the 150 full-time and 60 part-time affected employees.
He acknowledged that the development was bittersweet, saying it's a hard thing to fold a paper, but that the digital possibilities were great. His reporters already carry video cameras on assignments and are used to considering the Internet in their presentations, something many larger papers are still struggling to grasp.
"I think that they're very much in line with the times," said John P. Murray, a spokesman for the Newspaper Association of America. "There's still a demand for print, for ink on paper, and we don't see that changing any time in the near future," but it's better to put the energy into the Web than into duplicating efforts with two print editions, he said.
tricia.bishop@baltsun.com
Sun reporter Hanah Cho contributed to this article.