Small Circulation Newspapers

[Trichocyst]

I was recently offered the job of editor of a newspaper that will be published in central New Jersey once a month in conjunction with a local non-profit organization. It will be about 24-32 pages, will go out to about 18,000 homes monthly, and it will be up to me to decide on content, layout, etc. The man hiring me wants to position it as a community paper with topics relevant to the area, but it's been my experience that these kind of efforts can be easy to ignore if there aren't a good reason to be reading. Right now we're still in the planning stages and I haven't made any real decisions on content and I was hoping to get some feedback on what people like and dislike about small circulation newspapers. This won't be a daily place to get a news fix, but I feel like there's a way to make content attractive so that it won't go from the mail box to lining bird cages immediately. Right now we have freelance writers and 1-2 original comic strips slated to appear monthly and we've talked about buying some puzzles and games which I know some people love. As it's not a strictly news paper I am also considering pitching the idea of inviting short pieces of fiction that would involve the community or New Jersey in general.

Any feedback outside of the fact that I'm entering into a dying media is appreciated. Mostly looking to know what people would be interested in seeing, not seeing, in a paper like this.

[Meresgi]

A once a month circulation is pretty hard for me to come up with anything I would read in it, as most people sadly won't even care what happened 2 weeks ago, let alone a full month. If it's for a community area a good idea would just be for upcoming events in all parts of the community and interviews with the people holding those events. Kind of to get a buzz about a local clam bake in the next month or something like that.

[Saga]

I'm a sports reporter for a small weekly with about 10,000 circ, and I'm going to tell you you'll face some enormous challenges (which I'm sure you know), especially as a start up.

"Community paper with topics relevant to the area" is extremely broad. You need a niche or a focus of some kind, and because you're a monthly, no one's going to really come to you for breaking news. Best advice I can give you is to study, study, study: research other monthlies with similar subject matter to yours, both local and national, and make a note of everything.

Second, make sure your publication fills a need in the community that isn't there in the first place. If you want to keep it local and there are two other mags competing in the short fiction and news analysis market, you're already heading down the wrong path. People's opinions on here won't matter much because they aren't the market you're writing for.

The paper I work for is part of a publishing company that puts out about 5-6 other publications of varying release periods, some are seasonal, some are bimonthly, just depends. We're gonna start publishing a magazine initially scheduled to run twice a year. Here are the areas I looked at when researching other mags for content:

Total book length (total number of pages in the mag, on average)
Paper weight
Ad/edit radio
Number of columns, features and departments
Editorial content, style, tone, clarity, diction level, page layout and design style, typography, color scheme, advertisers, and so on and so forth.

We've established that our proposed magazine would fill a need in the community that currently exists, and I was tasked with doing thorough analysis on about 10 other similar publications.

Print journalism is only a dying media if that's all you focus on. It's a transformative media. Don't pigeonhole yourself into just print. You need to take the mag online, you need a place for the community to engage your content, give you feedback, bitch at each other, etc. Especially since you're a monthly, the time in between issues is an eternity for readers, so you'll have to constantly update the website with fresh and interesting content.

Use this link to identify trending color schemes and match them to mag covers and design choices/colors for the inside of the publication: http://kuler.adobe.com/#themes/rating?time=30

Other than that, good luck. I have no qualms about the profession I chose. I get paid, however little, for interviewing and writing about NBA megastars and coaches, NHL players, and other cool shit like D1 basketball and the AHL, all sprinkled in with the usual high school and intermediate-level college sports that every entry level position comes with.

EDIT: To piggyback off what the guy above me said, a monthly news publication will die a horrible, terrible death before it even gets off the ground, sorry to say. We live in an age where people were tweeting that Michael Jackson was officially pronounced dead before he fucking died. We have enough trouble as a weekly keeping up with daily news coverage, I can't even imagine what that headache would look like at a monthly.

And because my editor is an old fashioned nut case who has Asperger's and literally writes none of my paper, myself and the other reporters have the workload of a daily even though we're employed by a weekly paper. I had 34 stories at one point just plopped into my lap about two weeks ago. Been plodding through them, cut it down to about a dozen now, but it's fucking insane.

So yeah, don't assign anybody 34 stories at once. Although 15-20 would be manageable for a monthly pub and a good reporter.

[Trichocyst]

I have some ideas to tie the paper to other forms of media, but nothing concrete yet. Like I said before, the paper is in conjunction with a cancer NPO. When he initially pitched the idea to me I thought it would be more about that, but he wants to generalize it more and that's his call. I definitely want to find an area to focus in on so that we can garner some kind of reader base, but that is going to be tricky. It's a problem I want to address here in the early stages. I look at my own home town's monthly newsletter and it's awful. I feel like I'm more realistic about the expectations going into it than the rest of the people I'm working with and I'm totally aware of it being an uphill battle, but there's not much risk on my part going into it (aside from the time and effort) so I'm excited to at least try. I've been looking for any kind of steady work for some time and if this works out I'll at least have something going for me.

I definitely appreciate the advice though. Some of the things you mentioned are things I'd already thought about and my creative partner is eager to help me out. I am going to act like a professional and maybe that's what I'll become.

[Xantavia]

I would say try to avoid falling into any political bias. We had a small bi-monthy town paper, but it get bad really fast. Our town was had 2 political camps (side with the mayor, side that was anti-mayor). They quickly started writing articles that were just fancy opinion pieces, without stating the fact that they were opinion. It collapsed not long after people realized what was going on.

As a kid, we had small-town papers with local news. One high point is that they would do quite a few pieces on younger kids (schools, sports, or whatever). For the kids, it was awesome to see your name in print, even better if there was a photo (normally a group shot). Tugging on heartstrings, but I think parents love seeing this too. You might be able to include pieces like this to get some people to actually look at the paper if there might be somebody they know in it.

[Byrthnoth]

I'd advocate for providing a brief summary of government actions in the region every month. What happened, why it's important, what is going to happen, etc. I could see people growing to rely on you for a monthly politics fix, because most people don't care about their local government much more frequently than that anyway. As the above poster suggested, avoid biases. I'd personally love it if I could get a brief monthly summary of things like "What happened to Pittsburgh's bus routes?" and whatever else I'm missing out on.

If you're in to scanning meeting minutes, having a comedic, "On the Record" section could be funny as well. Just scan through and find ludicrous statements from the last month, then publish them in a comedy section.

Also, you said that you have an ~18,000 circulation. Is that self-selecting in some way, or is it mostly random? If it's not mostly random, you could try to play to your audience a little.

[BaneTheBrawler]

Expanding on Xantavia's comment about schoolkids, you could draw on local schools for a fair amount of your content. Go chat with the administrators, see if there's some journalism clubs, or just regular English classes, that would be interested in submitting some work.

Even if the articles aren't great, you'll probably get a fair number of parents subscribing. The "WOMG IM IN PRINT" factor is pretty cool. I got quoted out of context in the Star Tribune during middle school. Was awesome.

[Kerberoz]

Target senior citizens' interests. They're the only ones who still read papers.

[Trichocyst]

My boss is targeting a specific community in New Jersey which is how he got to that number of households. And all of that is exactly the kind of stuff I've been looking for so far, thank you.

[6souls]

Your paper sound like one that's in the neighbor hood I work in. http://www.parkbugle.org/ The readership is mostly old people, their favorite section is obituaries or as they call it "Lives Lived," to see if anyone they know passed. It does cover many stories that are important to the neighborhood businesses and their advertising helps to spotlight little known shops.

[Kang]

I'm an online reporter for an environmental and health and safety publication, but I also did an internship for a community paper that publishes both in print and online.

It seems to me that content isn't really an issue for any publication. It depends on how you get that content out to readers. People will read anything but they prefer to read it in a certain manner.

For me, I still love reading the weekend newspaper in my hand, but online news is just as good.

I hope that print doesn't die but it's getting harder and harder every day.

The Encyclopedia Britannica just went online a couple of days ago.

[Cesaria]

Expanding on Xantavia's comment about schoolkids, you could draw on local schools for a fair amount of your content. Go chat with the administrators, see if there's some journalism clubs, or just regular English classes, that would be interested in submitting some work.

Even if the articles aren't great, you'll probably get a fair number of parents subscribing. The "WOMG IM IN PRINT" factor is pretty cool. I got quoted out of context in the Star Tribune during middle school. Was awesome.

You'd be surprised what schools can come up with given the chance - and of course then people look for their kids' stuff in the paper so it actually gets read etc etc... My parents had a business doing a lot of projects in local schools, and one of the ones that they set up was a newspaper summer school in one of the local comps (basically to get the new intake of kids in, paired up with some of the older kids before they started off) - which then piggybacks onto the town council's newspaper and goes out as an insert in this I think it's 4 times a year. Once set up - it's run pretty much self-sustaining for a good 5 years or so now, with each intake of kids teaching the next lot page layout and the like.

[onjenae]

Target senior citizens' interests. They're the only ones who still read papers.

lmaooo i feel so insulted cuz i still read them lol

[Nephlite]

Thought about including a crime log? Most crime stats for local municipalities can be seen online or are subject to public record so you can put some blurbs in there to help community involvement. Local guys bust up a nice spraypaint ring? Toss it in there. I know a lot of older folks like to read stuff like that and will grab a paper for that kind of thing. My college had a school newspaper that a lot of alumni would come back to campus just to grab a copy of the paper to read and crime logs, sporting events, etc were the main focuses.