The Carpenters once had a nice song called Rainy Days and Mondays – and while rainy days will continue in the future, Mondays will not, at least not for the printed edition of the News & Record.

The announcement came in the form of an email to print subscribers on Monday, Oct. 6, with the paper notifying readers that, starting the week of November 3, the News & Record will stop printing on Mondays. It will still publish Tuesday through Sunday, but the first day of the work week will now be digital only.

The company’s leaders explained that it was a cost-saving move brought on by industry pressures, advertising challenges and rising print costs.

To longtime readers of the paper, it feels like a very large sign. It feels like one more nail in the coffin.

For over a century, the News & Record printed seven days a week. The vanishing of the Monday print edition is just the latest stage in a slow, painful shrinkage that’s been obvious for years.

The paper’s letter to subscribers tried to put a positive face on the change. Executive Editor Dimon Kendrick-Holmes wrote that the digital e-edition will still be published seven days a week, complete with comics and puzzles, and also wrote that “your story lives here.”

The email included phone numbers, links and reassurances that the staff “live here, work here, and are part of the fabric of this community.”

All of that may be true – but anyone watching the trajectory of the News & Record could not help but notice that the fabric of the paper is fraying.

Over the last two decades, the Greensboro paper has grown thinner and thinner. The width of the pages literally shrank. The number of sections declined. Some holidays were skipped, breaking the old streak of 365 papers every year.

The best-known comic strips disappeared. The prominent downtown headquarters was abandoned and demolished and many operations were moved to Winston-Salem.

Even the typos grew more frequent. Every newspaper makes mistakes, but the News & Record in recent years reached the point where there were some very obvious ones in headlines and its editors even had to publish explanations telling readers why typos and other errors were showing up so often and why a newspaper didn’t make it to their driveway that day.

Then there’s the content. Local reporting that once filled the pages has steadily dried up over the years. After the first two pages, much of the material consists of the Associated Press stories that were on the television news two days earlier. There have been fewer stories with actual Greensboro ties.

Even those front page stories sometimes seem trivial.  Recently, the Greensboro paper ran a front page, above the fold story about Ruby the Rocker Dog, which was about the mascot dog for the High Point baseball team.

Not that many years ago, if a big story happened just before midnight, it could still make the morning paper. However, about eight years ago, deadlines were rolled back to 8 p.m. – so, by the time the paper hit doorsteps, much of the “news” was already yesterday’s news.  The story about the big Saturday evening  Duke-Carolina basketball game, for instance, would be stale by the time it was in the printed issue of the News & Record on Monday.

The paper’s retreat from the local beat has been easy to see at public meetings of local governments. Twenty years ago, as the Rhino Times covered the Guilford County Board of Commissioners, there would always be a News & Record reporter at the table – and, usually, one from the High Point Enterprise. Over time, the N&R stopped showing up to commissioners’ meetings. These days, it’s almost always the case that the Rhino Times is the only media outlet in the meeting room.

The circulation numbers tell the story even more starkly.

In 2006, the News & Record had a daily circulation of about 90,400 and a Sunday circulation around 111,000.

In 2021, it claimed a daily circulation of 21,510.

In 2023, the paper reported a daily circulation of 15,151 and a Sunday circulation of 16,725.

In 2025, one report showed a daily average print run of just at 7,000 for the N&R. That’s in a county of roughly 550,000 people. And keep in mind that some of those 7,000 copies go straight from driveways to recycling bins.  Others languish unbought on racks or in stores.

To anyone who lived in Greensboro in the 1960s or 1970s, the new numbers are almost unimaginable. Back then, it seemed as though every household got the paper – actually, got two papers. The Greensboro News landed on the porch in the morning, and the Greensboro Record hit the doorstep around 3:30 in the afternoon. In the early 1980s the two paper’s merged into the Greensboro News & Record, which was still thick with local stories and ads.

Years ago, the paper dropped the word “Greensboro” from its name. Many in the industry thought it was a mistake.

Former Rhino Times editor and former owner John Hammer used to call it the “Eleven County Area News & Record” whenever he wrote about it, because it seemed to cover everywhere in central North Carolina, with just a little Greensboro news thrown in.

That expansion of focus stretched the staff thin – and Greensboro readers paid the price.

The Rhino Times began to cancel its News & Record print subscription several years ago but was then offered a special rate of $8 a month. Last week, the Rhino Times was informed that the price of the subscription would now be going back up to several hundred dollars a year. That means the N&R will be losing more subscribers as those discounted rates are taken away.

The new cutback in print for the N&R comes on the heels of a similar move by the High Point Enterprise, which has already dropped two days of print.

Across the country, local newspapers are folding, shrinking or retreating to online-only operations.

The Rhino Times itself ended its print edition in 2018, and while the Rhino is  never pleased to see another local news outlet slip, the trend line is obvious.

The N&R’s own subscriber letter promised that the seven-day digital replica will be “waiting for you to page through, zoom in on, and print stories from.” It assured readers that comics, puzzles and syndicated columnists will still be there, along with hundreds of online strips and dozens of crosswords. “Your stories have always lived here and been at the heart of what we do, and that will never change,” the editor’s note declared.

But even those words underscored what has changed. The commitment is now to an e-edition, not to a physical paper. And once a newspaper breaks the seven-day habit, history suggests it rarely goes back.

It’s worth pausing to remember just how dominant the paper once was. In the 1970s, the News & Record was everywhere and packed with all sorts of things: grocery ads, job listings, high school sports scores, obituaries, court reports – the paper was the main conduit for community life in the area. If you wanted to know what the Greensboro City Council had decided, or which local business was opening, or which candidate was running for county office, you found it in the News & Record.

You can still do some of that with the paper, but the fall of the Monday print version may well be a sign of more evaporation to come.

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