The daily, owned by the Ekspress Grupp, which also operates the Delfi online news portal, and two weeklies, Eesti Ekspress and Maaleht, had up until now had a Saturday issue, known as LP. Now, Friday's edition will incorporate the weekend edition, and will thus be bulkier than it had been, BNS reports.

"We have received a lot of feedback from subscribers that the weekend newspaper arrives in their mailbox too late, often only on Saturday afternoons," Ekspress Meedia CEO Argo Virkebau said of the development.

"Furthermore, people are much more mobile in the summer, which is why we decided to extend the reading time of the weekend paper and to package it into a bulkier weekend newspaper, containing daily news, long interviews and colorful feature stories alike, or everything that there has been in Eesti Paevaleht and LP to date," Ekspress Meedia CEO Argo Virkebau said.

The joint weekend edition of EPL and LP run to 60 pages and continue sections from LP, including a long interview, opinion pages, feature stories, investigative journalism, as well as food, fashion, health and car pages, BNS reports.

According to ERR's online Estonian news, the move has been announced as a temporary one, however.

While the reason for the ending of the Saturday LP edition of EPL was not reported, delivery costs may be a factor.

In January, Eesti Post, also known as Omniva, the postal and logistics company based in Tallinn and serving all three Baltic States,was already considering reducing the frequency of newspaper and magazine delivery, citing economic factors, particularly regarding more remote areas.

Ekspress Meedia, together with the other major private media company in Estonia, Postimees Grupp (formerly Eesti Meedia), do however already jointly run their own Express Post service, which carries a lower unit cost, Virkebau had previously claimed, though this generally does not cover more remote areas in any case.

Summer sees something of a flight from Tallinn and other larger population centres as families relocate to summer houses, either at weekends or for much of the summer period, and some of these sanctuaries are likely to be in more remote areas.