By Cyndy Slovak-Barton.
Did you notice the physical dimensions of your Hays Free Press got a little smaller recently? With changes in the industry, generally driven by the New York Times and other journalistic icons, paper manufacturers are now using a broadsheet piece of paper that’s about an inch thinner in width.
An inch doesn’t seem like much, until you realize that over the entire Hays Free Press, that loss equates to approximately 3,250 words in a 16-page paper, which is typically the size of our weekly edition.
What does that mean for readers? A few things, some good, others not as much: shorter stories, fewer photos and visuals, less paper to recycle.
Know what else it may mean? Not seeing as many of the stories and photos you want to see each week. Did you child’s sports team do something fantastic? Know of a fantastic organization or a really cool story about a local hero? We may not have enough room to run it in the print edition.
And isn’t being in the newspaper more fun when it’s in print? Somehow, online stories just don’t pack the same punch. It’s hard to cut out and mail Grandma a photo of Johnny or Sally in the school musical when it’s on the web. Sure, you can Facebook her or attach the link in an email. But let’s be honest, it’s not the same.
One way to help make sure more of your local news stories make it to print is to get more people to subscribe and more advertisers to place an ad. How does that make difference?
With more ads and more subscribers, a news organization can do more. For the Hays Free Press, we could print 20 page newspapers instead of 16. That means more local news – more photos of kids, more stories on our community, more room for everything that just can’t fit in 16 pages.
Additional revenue can also provide a news organization with resources to cover more stories, do investigations into issues and provide you with comprehensive local news. It can increase the amount of video online and offer subscribers bonus extras – exclusives and features not covered elsewhere.
Some advertisers say they don’t have the budget to buy an ad. Others say newspapers are a dying medium, but that claim doesn’t seem to apply to weekly newspapers.
Why? Because communities, newspapers are the only local source of news coverage. That’s news not found anywhere else. The Hays Free Press is here. We are a part of your community and we bring you news from a local perspective. Almost all of our staff live in Hays County and have students in the local schools.
So we invite our subscribers to encourage their friends and neighbors to sign up. And we ask local companies and organizations to consider advertising with us. Because doing so is a great way to say “I care about this community.”
Remember, the smaller size paper means a loss of more than just words.
