By Peter W. Wagner Few customers would enter a bakery to buy a cake and expect to make the batter yourself. Nor would they schedule repair work on their car and assume they’d have to provide all the parts. Selling newspaper and shopper advertising is more difficult today than it …
Read More »Best writing tip ever: Read stories aloud
By Bart Pfankuch Writing a great news article takes thought, concentration and a basis of solid reporting. Some articles flow from the fingertips like a flood, gushing forth in a logical manner, flowing at a proper pace with clear meaning. Others require a struggle that can seem insurmountable. Either way, …
Read More »Time to try a ‘StayCation’ section
by Peter W. Wagner With COVID-19 pressing many families to cancel distant summer vacations, it’s a good time to consider publishing one or more “StayCation” sections. Our Iowa Information team produced a four-week series of “StayCation” sections in 2011 when America’s high gas prices also kept families close to home. …
Read More »Everything little is big today
by Peter W. Wagner When my wife, Connie, and I founded our first publication, The Golden Shopper, we were still in the first year of our marriage. It was October 3, 1962. Our little town of Sibley had less than 2,500 population and we only printed 3,000 copies each week. The …
Read More »NPA convention canceled for 2020
The Nevada Press Association Board of Directors has decided to cancel this year’s annual convention, which was scheduled to be held in Pahrump on Sept. 26. “We can’t predict the future,” said NPA President Noah Cusick, president of niche publications for the Las Vegas Review-Journal. “But we know it’s unlikely …
Read More »Tough times can bring opportunities, too
By John Kimball If you look, there are opportunities for newspapers to grow advertising revenue in some categories – not in spite of the COVID-19 health crisis, but because of it. Even as things begin to open up, financial planning, home decorating, landscaping, local home improvement and other types of …
Read More »What journalism brings to times of crisis
By Al Cross Our country may not be in a depression, but the newspaper business is, and its fatality rate may be as great at that of the coronavirus. The pandemic and its economic restrictions have accelerated closures and mergers, which have increasingly affected county-seat weeklies, long the most stable …
Read More »Winning back advertising lost during the COVID-19 pandemic
By Peter W. Wagner Many publishers and their staffs are worried about jump-starting their local advertisers following the COVID-19 shutdown. Although they’ve faithfully published their paper, often at a loss the last three months, some former clients’ media confidence and buying habits have changed. We’ve had three long-established weekly newspapers …
Read More »Tips to do great journalism from your home
By Bart Pfankuch In the COVID-19 era, many more journalists are working from home, some enjoying the freedom, a few discovering the difficulties and most hopefully avoiding the traps. As someone who has worked from home for nearly three years, and who spent five years lightly supervised in a capital …
Read More »Awards contest gets new name, fewer circulation divisions
Nevada’s premier journalism contest has normally been called the Better Newspaper Contest, even though news websites and magazines joined the competition several years ago. The Nevada Press Association Awards Committee recently rectified that anomaly by renaming the contest the Awards of Excellence. The committee also made a made a few …
Read More »