When we announced changes coming to the Hermiston Herald on July 1, we knew there would be questions and there would likely be complaints.

After all, one of the big changes we will be making is delivering the print paper only on Wednesday. The Saturday print paper is going away.

We have no plans to give readers less news, but we are going to change how we delivery it and package it. It’s a change we have to make. Here’s why.

The cold fact is that the Hermiston Herald, with the existing staffing level and delivery frequency we have had cost us more money to produce than we brought in this year. We are fortunate that the family owners of EO Media Group are news people who love newspapers. They are proud that the Herald has more than 100 years of history in this community and want it to have many more years, decades and — if possible — centuries of providing news to readers and a means for advertisers to reach those readers.

When my family moved to the area in 1973, Hermiston had a population of about 5,000 people. Later in life, when I left Hermiston in 1992 after stints as a reporter for the East Oregonian and reporter and editor of the Hermiston Herald, Hermiston had grown to about 10,700 people. Today it is home to more than 17,000 people. The city has grown 60 percent since 1992 and 250 percent since the early 1970s.

If the Herald’s readership kept pace with the city’s growth, this would be a very different conversation and publication. But the Herald subscriber numbers shrank.

To honor the community’s history, and ensure a future, we need to do something, and likely several somethings, differently. People have been telling us, in absentia, that they just don’t need the Herald like they once did.

We are going to try to reverse that trend, but we are going to need your help. In the coming months, we need you to tell us what you do like and don’t like, about what is in the Herald or what isn’t there. And we are going to be asking members of the community to contribute to the things we publish in print and post online in various ways. If you are reading this in print or online, we want to know what is most important to you and least important to you about how we spend our time and space.

There are some things we know we have to do and some things we think we know, and a whole lot of things where we really need information and help.

We know we can know longer sustain printing two editions a week at a time when generations in our community get their news and information on smartphones, tablets and computers.

We will become, in essence, a daily news service, publishing information digitally at least five days a week, sometimes six and often seven. And we will print a newspaper once a week, too. So you will have many options for how and where to find news of our community.

That effort has already started. We are now updating HermistonHerald.com at least five days a week. We are sending out email newsletters with updates five days a week. We are posting links to our stories and interacting with readers/fans at least five days a week on Facebook and through Twitter. We may add other social media services too if that benefits enough of you.

Another key piece of the puzzle is that we are going to work hard to improve our partnership with our sister paper, the East Oregonian, to make the best use of our local people. Our mission is, and will be, to cover Umatilla and Morrow counties the best we can with the people we have. Now it is not unusual to see two reporters from our company — one representing the Hermiston Herald and one representing the East Oregonian — attending the same event or meeting and writing at least two separate stories from the same set of facts and circumstances.

We can no longer afford to do that. We want to use our reporters’ time efficiently to bring more news to you. We need to get to more events and more places more often. We are going to cover the community as best we can, get the stories written, then decide how to use them online and in print with the various news products we have at our disposal to get news to you.

In an ideal world, we would love you to pay to subscribe to both the East Oregonian and Hermiston Herald, and/or pay to buy ads in both. But most people in our community do not subscribe to both. Most don’t subscribe to either paper. So we won’t pretend we are competing with the East Oregonian because we aren’t. We are partners.

We are already competing with your job, TV news, cable TV, Netflix, family, sports, community events and life for your time. We don’t need to compete with ourselves, too.

We will do our best to make the investment of time and money you make with us worthwhile.

We ask for your patience while we do some remodeling. And if you haven’t read the Herald or the EO in a while — or ever — we ask that you check in with us from time to time and see what’s new.

— Gary L. West will be editor of the Hermiston Herald beginning July 1 and Hermiston editor for the East Oregonian. Follow him on Twitter @GaryLWest