Moapa Valley Progress
This week, the Moapa Valley PROGRESS is advancing into new territory with an all new look. The independently owned and operated weekly newspaper which covers the communities of the Moapa Valley area, has adopted a new and improved broadsheet format beginning with today’s current edition. The new format will be offering two sections to start: a main section and a B section for Sports & Recreation and Valley Life topics.
“We have been working on this change for quite some time and we are proud to finally be rolling it out this week,” said PROGRESS editor, Vernon Robison. “We think that it will be a significant improvement for our readers and our advertisers alike.”
For the nearly 28 years since the PROGRESS was established, the publication has always been distributed in a smaller tabloid format. But changes in printing operations in recent years that favor broadsheet formatting, have caused snags here and there in the local newspaper’s week-to-week production, Robison said.
“The truth is that we have known that this change was coming for almost a decade now,” Robison said. “But it is a surprisingly complex proposition for a newspaper to change its format. It is one of those really daunting projects that you, sort of, just want to put off until you can’t put it off any longer. And it has only been in the last year or two that we have reached that point.”
Robison said that the format change would open new avenues to the publication: additional advertising services that haven’t been possible in the past. These include a variety of front page advertising possibilities, sectional ads which place marketing campaigns closer to target market news content, and much more flexibility with pre-print inserts.
“It will allow us to better sectionalize our content which opens up all kinds of new possibilities to our advertisers,” Robison said. “We appreciate the local businesses that are our advertising clients and we have always been on the lookout for new ways to get their messages out to the community. I think this will help us, and them, to better reach the segments of the community that they are most trying to reach.”
In addition, the new format will be easier on the eyes of readers. It will allow for larger photos, additional features, and a more convenient and ‘scannable’ layout, Robison said.
“Of course, we are still working through the process of maximizing all of the graphic arts possibilities that are involved with this big change,” Robison said. “But even from the get-go, I think that the pages will pop much better for our readers.”
Despite this significant change to Moapa Valley’s hometown newspaper, Robison emphasizes that there are some things that will not change.
“We are still an independently-owned, and locally-run company,” Robison said. “In fact, we are the only independent, and the longest continually-running, newspaper in northeastern Clark County.”
“Another thing that won’t change is our solid focus on the people, events and issues in the Moapa Valley communities,” Robison added. “That is what we have been devoted to since Day 1, and it is what we do best. No one covers the Moapa Valley like we do. And that is not likely to change anytime soon.”
