The June issue is here and you’ll notice it’s a little bit thicker than the previous issues since I started mailing to every Skye Canyon home in March.
With this issue, I’ve increased my page count from 16 pages to 20 pages.
Why?
Well, that’s because there’s a few more advertisers that have come on board from the prevous month.
In the newspaper business, more advertisers general means more pages. That’s because we like to keep a 50-50 advertising-to-editorial ratio.
This issue, the amount of paid advertising I have adds up to 10.375 pages. Last month, it was 8.75 pages.
So the quick math says last month should have been 16 total pages while this month should be 20 pages.
Easy enough.
So there’s about two more pages of advertising in the paper this month. That also means there are two more pages of articles.
Good for the readers, but a little more work for me to come up with these stories.
That’s where you come in.
As I’ve mentioned, I’m always on the lookout for Skye Canyon residents sending me potential story ideas.
This month, our cover story came initially from someone not interested in sending me a story, but from someone interested in advertising.
Tammy McCullough is a long-time Skye Canyon resident and a Realtor. She’s been paying attention to the newspaper since I started printing back in October.
When she called, I explained to her that my policy is to only have one business category per 10 pages of the newspaper. At 16 pages, I already had two Realtor advertisers so I couldn’t really add another one.
For those saying the math doesn’t add up. I have one Realtor for the first 10 pages and the second one until I get to 20 pages.
But in the course of our conversation, we talked about her sister being a Special Olympics competitor and her being an officer of the organization.
That’s a good article for me and ended up our cover feature. So even though it didn’t work out for actual revenue for me, I was able to get a good story out of it. This is just as important.
— Kirk Kern