National Newspaper Week is Oct. 6-12, and October also marks the completion of seven years of publishing NEWS On the Green, our experiment in hyperlocal journalism. We undertook this venture to see if our community would support what we do. The results are mixed. We have individuals who subscribe and resubscribe every year, and some of them pass on extra dollars when they can. We have readers who have sent us generous donations. We have advertisers who run their ads month after month. We also have people who say they love what we do, but never turn that positive attitude into financial support. And, we have people who hate us, upset by something we wrote or didn’t write, or just lump us in with their negative opinion about the press.
We keep going. We have spent seven years telling you what our elected officials are doing, how your tax dollars are being spent, who has gotten arrested, what’s new in the schools. We have written about history, arts and entertainment, kids and senior citizens. We have tried to cast a wide net over a small area, because no one else tells your stories as comprehensively as we have tried to do.
Newspapers ain’t what they used to be financially or in terms of reputation or the way they do things. Even those who still publish print editions spend a lot of time with their online efforts. I don’t know how they make money online because we don’t. Well, we make a little bit of money online, but certainly not enough to pay our electric bill each month. We chose a traditional business model for NEWS On the Green, and that was a mistake. We should have charged per copy from the outset. But, we are not ready to start charging for single copies of the paper. We have too many other things going on that have nothing to do with NEWS On the Green to do something that essentially would mean starting over. It’s an option in the future.
We love what we do and we think we are serving our community. We have no axes to grind, we have no political agendas, and we don’t editorialize, so we never tell you how to vote, or what to think. We are totally independent, and I know there are people who think we are beholden to some corporation. Our corporation is PS Pinchot-Swogger Publishing LLC – us.
And, we don’t use artificial intelligence. For better or worse, every word in our news stories is written by a human who refers to interview notes, official documents, emails, texts and the occasional dictionary, not a digital aid.
NEWS On the Green will continue, but it’s up to you how long and in what form. We are limited to 16 pages because we rarely make our advertising goals to print more pages, and we always have stories that we don’t have room for in the paper. Sometimes, they show up a month or two later; occasionally, they never see the light of day. With more support, we could print more stories, more photos, a wider range of stories, or even make a more concerted effort to make our online content more timely.
The majority of you who read this will have picked up your copy between Oct. 6 and 12, National Newspaper Week. All we can ask is that you consider how important NEWS On the Green is to you, and whether it is important enough to financially support us.
Joe and Judi
