Members

By Peter W. Wagner Some of you may remember the story, strongly circulated a decade ago, about a man who sold hot dogs along the side of a road. The man didn’t hear very well so he didn’t have a radio. He had eye problems, so he didn’t read the …

 By Peter Wagner We published at least three stories recently regarding older Sheldon citizens being scammed over the phone for thousands of dollars. But even though the first two crimes were printed in our Sheldon Mail-Sun in detail, a third individual was taken for soon after for $16,000. When asked …

By Bart Pfankuch A major goal of news reporting is to keep readers abridged of things, so it makes sense that uncovering and understanding trends should be part of any writer’s toolbox. Editors — and readers — love trend reporting. Editors puff up when they’re outlet is first to report …

David Beard’s Morning MediaWire from Poynter has these tips, and he promises more. Here’s the full column, where you can also sign up for the daily newsletter. From Paul Janensch: As an editor at four newspapers and an associate professor of journalism at Quinnipiac University, these were among the writing …

By Kevin Slimp I really didn’t expect to do much traveling this summer, but plans don’t always work out as expected and that certainly has been the case for me. The truth is I really love working with newspapers and when I get a call from a paper within a …

By Peter Wagner The biggest problem publishing newspapers today is public perception. Every newspaper, from the largest metro to the smallest family-owned community weekly, is judged by the actions of all the others.
  If a large chain decides to reduce the number of day they publish or the size of their …

(Editor’s note: Randy Van Dyne, executive director of the All Hazards Training Center at the University of Findlay, Ohio, spoke at the 2018 Ohio News Media Association convention on workplace security and wrote this column at ONMA’s request. One of the center’s specialties is training media outlets such as ABC …

By Kevin Slimp Over the past week or so, I received an email from a publisher asking if I could send examples of community newspapers who are doing things right. His plan was to contact these publishers to learn if he could benefit from their experiences. I told him I …

By Peter Wagner Local and even metro newspapers print very few new or used car display ads anymore. Automotive advertising, once a huge part of every paper’s revenue, has all but disappeared. Even those multi-page metro paper weekend automotive sections, packed full of car and truck feature stories and loaded …