The New FXBG Advance: Three Squares a Day

THE MORNING READ. FXBG Advance Monday, July 6, 2026.

By Steve Watkins, ADVANCE EDITOR

Owen Winkel/Unsplash

You might have noticed—I sure hope you did—that The Advance came out in a different format the past several days. Instead of a newsletter with links to articles, columns, and stories showing up in your inbox at 6 a.m. on Thursday, Friday, and Sunday, we sent you our posts one at a time throughout the day: “The Morning Read” at 6, “The Midday Read” at 11, and “The Afternoon Read” at 4. We’ll be following that schedule going forward, with the newsletter (dessert in our admittedly tortured headline metaphor) now going out in the evenings with links to the earlier posts—in case you might have missed something and want to go back and check it out.

Our plan is to run with this new delivery system Sunday through Friday. Saturdays we’ll only post once in the morning—“Our Weekly Reader,” with links to several posts that ran during the week and that we think will be of particular interest—once again in case you missed them, or if there’s something you want to reread or share.

Research on the best time to post, and the optimal number of posts, for a publication such as The Advance (or the Fredericksburg Free Press, or the Free Lance-Star), is all over the place, depending on so many factors that the sweet spot, or spots, is/are anybody’s guess. We’ll try this new thing for awhile and see if it works. It will mean no more clicking around to read the rest of an article, unless you’re starting from the newsletter. No jumps to other pages. No fire wall, certainly.

We’ll still include hyperlinks where appropriate so you can check out sources and dive deeper into references. Otherwise, what you’ll find in each post you open is uninterrupted text by some of the finest writers in the area, three times a day.

Let me know your thoughts on this, or on anything else. You can get in touch via email at swatkins000@gmail.com (those are three zeroes, btw, and not the letter O), or give me a call at 540-842-2066.

Speaking of the Free Lance-Star, if you picked up a copy over the 4^th of July weekend, you had the honor of reading multiple articles about their new owner, a billionaire named David Hoffmann. The Poynter Institute, a journalism research center and owner of the Tampa Bay Times, broke the story before the hagiography package came out:

Headline: “Lee Enterprises tells its papers to run front-page profile of chair and billionaire David Hoffmann this weekend.”

Subhead: “Some at the company say the unusual request raises questions about editorial independence.”

Lede: “As the nation celebrates its 250^th birthday, readers picking up a copy of their local paper this weekend might expect photos of fireworks or July Fourth celebrations to dominate the front page. But if their local paper is owned by Lee Enterprises, they will instead likely see a large portrait of the company’s chairman, billionaire David Hoffmann, under the headline ‘NEW HOPE FOR LOCAL NEWS,’ according to a mockup distributed internally earlier this week and viewed by Poynter.”

The Free Lance-Star—as I wrote a couple of weeks ago HERE—is one of 72 Lee Enterprises daily newspapers (the Richmond Times-Dispatch and the Culpeper News are two others), purchased earlier this year by Hoffmann to go along with 70 other newspapers he already owned around the country. Lee, and now Hoffmann, also owns another 350 weekly and specialty publications.

Here are a couple of Free Lance-Star headlines, for those of you who can’t scale their fire wall:

“NEW HOPE FOR LOCAL NEWS: Why David Hoffmann is investing in newspapers, including yours.”

“David Hoffmann is investing millions to preserve local newspapers.”

“How David Hoffmann built the business behind his investment in local newspapers.”

Also, by reporter Percy Bysshe Shelley, a short dispatch headlined “Ozymandias,” curiously written as a loose sonnet:

I met a traveler from an antique land

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:

And on the pedestal these words appear:

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

***

Steve Watkins is editor of The FXBG Advance.