For many Grays Harbor households, the weekly shopping routine has included The East County News and On The Harbors, free publications from the Grays Harbor News Group that arrive in the mailbox once a week stuffed with advertising inserts.

Those households will keep getting the ads, but the “wrapper” that’s held them together will no longer be made up of newspaper pages with stories, photos and classified advertising.

The East County News and On The Harbors will cease publication after the Oct. 9 issues.

Those publications – East County News for about three decades, and On The Harbors for the past few years – have carried stories that appeared first in other Grays Harbor News Group publications. They were directed at nonsubscribers of the group’s other products, The Daily World, The Vidette and The North Coast News.

The two “shopper” publications don’t have their own staff and dropping them will help us focus more time on our news products, The Daily World, the weeklies and their websites.

What that will mean to folks who have been getting a smattering of the news in those two shoppers and want to keep getting it is that they’ll need to subscribe to one or more of our newspapers, in print or online.

By the way, that sampling you’ve been getting is just a drop in the bucket compared to the full slate of news we report.

What you’ve been missing are feature stories about your neighbors, news of local government, letters to the editor, arts and entertainment news, and extensive sports coverage of preps and every other team we follow around here.

We hope you enjoyed the news we’ve offered for free. There’s a lot more where that came from. We think local journalism is a critically important aspect of life in this community. We hope you agree and will support it.

To subscribe to any of our publications, call Grays Harbor News Group’s office in Aberdeen at 360-532-4000.

The Grays Harbor News Group