Episode Transcript
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get more done. Grammar
1:07
Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty. And today
1:10
we're going to talk about something that
1:12
many writers dream of, but almost nobody
1:14
gets to do. And that's buying your
1:17
hometown newspaper. Today, I'm
1:19
here with Samantha Enslen and her
1:21
husband, Greg Enslen. And you'll
1:23
recognize Samantha's name because she's a very
1:25
frequent contributor to the Grammar Girl podcast.
1:28
And when she told me they
1:30
had bought their hometown newspaper, the
1:32
Tippie Canoe Gazette in Tip City,
1:34
Ohio, I knew I had to have the
1:37
mind to talk about it. And I
1:39
put questions out on social media and
1:41
I got more questions than I have
1:43
ever gotten about anything I've put out
1:45
asking for questions from before. So people
1:47
are really interested in this. Samantha
1:53
and Greg, welcome to the Grammar Girl podcast.
1:56
Awesome. Thank you so much for inviting us.
2:00
see you. Yeah, you bet.
2:02
And it's great for just people to
2:04
see you, Samantha, anyway, just since you're
2:06
such a frequent contributor. But, and my
2:08
understanding is that this was primarily Greg's
2:10
thing. So please tell me
2:12
just how this came about. How did you
2:15
come to buy your hometown
2:17
newspaper? Well, actually, I have
2:19
been wanting to buy it for a
2:21
long time. So it was something I've
2:23
been trying to make happen
2:25
for several years. And
2:27
I used to write for the paper, and have
2:30
written for the paper for off
2:32
and on for the last 15 years. And
2:35
every time it would come up for sale, I
2:37
would try to sneak in the situation
2:40
and make a bid.
2:42
And I never, never was successful before this last
2:44
time. But this last time I got a call
2:46
from the editor and she said, it
2:49
looks like we're shutting down the paper unless we can
2:51
find a local buyer who's interested in buying it. And
2:53
I said, Oh, boy, hang on a second. Let me
2:55
talk to my wife about that. So then we had
2:58
many conversations about it before we pulled the
3:00
trigger. Yeah, I bet. Now
3:02
to be fair, in past times
3:05
when Greg was interested, I was
3:07
like, are you insane? No, we
3:09
do not need another thing to
3:11
keep track of. But, you
3:13
know, over time I was like, okay, this
3:15
actually is something that's really important to him.
3:17
And so yeah, like Greg said,
3:20
we're like, all right, let's figure out how
3:22
to make this happen. Amazing,
3:24
right. Because you have a whole other business.
3:27
I mean, you have Dragonfly editorial. We have
3:29
several other businesses actually, Dragonfly is the big
3:31
one, but I'm also a writer and I've
3:33
written 34 bucks.
3:38
And that's a big part of my
3:40
time is trying to find time to write fiction
3:43
and nonfiction. And then I'm also on our
3:45
local city council, which is a large time
3:47
sink. And Sam and
3:49
I have some Airbnb's. So we're, we're
3:51
quite busy. But
3:54
this last opportunity when it came up, I talked to
3:56
her and I said, I have a, I have a
3:58
theory about. newspapers,
4:00
local newspapers, and
4:03
Facebook. And I think a
4:05
lot of people think local newspapers are
4:08
a dying breed, and I actually think they're making
4:10
a comeback. That's my supposition. So
4:12
we're going to see if it works out. I'm not sure. That's
4:16
great. Okay. I want people to ask questions about that.
4:18
And I will say people did ask, are they
4:20
crazy? And I wasn't going to bring that up. No,
4:22
please do. Yes. Yeah. So first of all, can you
4:24
paint a picture for me of what
4:27
the newspaper is, where it is, what
4:34
it's like, how big it is, what the
4:37
building is like, how many people work there, and stuff
4:41
like that? Well, I would say
4:43
it's a modern business because we don't
4:45
have any employees and we
4:47
don't have any infrastructure
4:49
and we don't have an office and we
4:51
don't have... We have a post office box.
4:54
And I have about 15 people
4:57
that work for me, but we're all freelancers. And
4:59
that's how we've structured the business. So there's no
5:01
overhead, which is great. That makes it a lot
5:04
easier to make fast decisions.
5:06
You fixed overhead. Trust me,
5:08
there's overhead. There's
5:11
some overhead, but not like a brick and
5:13
mortar business, not like an old school newspaper
5:15
with the print presses and all that kind
5:17
of stuff. But yeah, one
5:19
of the things that I think is going to
5:21
be helpful moving forward is that we are a
5:24
group of freelancers and I can bring people on,
5:26
we can let people go if they don't work
5:28
out, and I can keep my rates low on
5:31
trying to get as much content
5:33
into the papers I can in
5:35
a fiscally responsible fashion. Was
5:39
it always structured that way or did you restructure it
5:41
to be that way? It's gotten less
5:43
successful over time as
5:46
a local newspaper would. But
5:48
we're located north of Dayton, we're in Tip City, and
5:50
it's our
5:53
local paper. It's been in business for about
5:55
15 years. There are several
5:57
other towns around here that their papers have closed. So
5:59
we... have tried, paper has tried over
6:01
time to expand some of their coverage. And
6:04
it's a shame to see a
6:07
town loses newspaper, especially a small town.
6:10
Right. And that's Tip City, Ohio, right? Yes.
6:12
Tip City, Ohio, we're north of Dayton. And
6:14
it's difficult for local people to get the
6:16
word out about things, not even businesses, but
6:18
like, you know, PTA and things like that.
6:20
It's hard for them to get the word
6:23
out about events and things that are happening
6:25
if there's no local paper. Mm
6:27
hmm. Yeah. And when one of the
6:29
people asked, you know, how you differentiate yourself
6:31
from the competition, and I was wondering, is
6:33
there even competition? What do you consider your
6:35
competition? Unfortunately, 10
6:38
years ago, this paper, there were
6:40
four papers in this little in
6:42
this business, and those all three
6:44
have closed. So this is
6:46
the remaining existing paper. And
6:48
like I said, there are several small
6:50
towns around here, they're actually larger than Tip that
6:53
don't have a paper. So there isn't
6:55
actually any competition for us except for the Dayton Daily
6:57
News. And then we have a larger town north of
6:59
us called Troy, Ohio, and they have a they have
7:01
a twice weekly paper. So those
7:04
are our competition. But I try not to
7:06
look at it like that. I feel like
7:08
my competition is Facebook and Nextdoor. Those are
7:10
the two things I'm trying to scoop.
7:13
If I can get information to people
7:15
before that, or
7:17
get it out to more people than Facebook's
7:19
algorithm can, then I'm doing my job. Yeah.
7:21
And is it just online? Or do you
7:23
have print as well? We're
7:26
exclusively we were exclusively print, and
7:28
it's a weekly goes out on
7:31
Wednesdays. And then when I bought the
7:33
paper, one of the first things we did was add a
7:35
website, but it is important
7:38
to me that the news be free. So that anything
7:40
that's on the website is free, we don't have a
7:42
paywall or anything like that. I cannot stand those things.
7:46
I feel like they just discourage people from
7:48
learning what they need to know. So we
7:50
have we don't have a paywall, but we
7:52
don't put every story up online. It's about 10 to
7:55
15 stories a week. And it's a selection
7:58
of what's in the print paper. But if If you want to
8:00
know what's going on, you really do need to buy the print
8:02
paper. That's kind of how we're moving
8:04
forward right now. That
8:07
was a common question, is sort of
8:09
what is your business model? Is it
8:11
advertising? Is it subscriptions? How does that
8:13
break down revenue-wise? What
8:16
are you doing to make this work, especially given that
8:18
so many of the others have gone out of business?
8:21
One of the things that Greg is doing,
8:23
which he will probably be too shy
8:26
to talk about, is a
8:28
truly Herculean effort of dragging
8:31
the paper into the 21st
8:33
century, or whatever century we're
8:36
in right now. Literally
8:38
when he bought the paper,
8:42
the subscription system for the newspaper that
8:44
ran the paper was on a laptop.
8:48
The whole thing? The whole thing. A
8:51
single laptop. Using
8:53
a subscription tool software
8:55
that was no longer supported, that
8:58
didn't exist anymore. The company went
9:00
under. I
9:06
found to my horror that we
9:08
didn't even have email addresses for
9:11
most of the customers. I was like,
9:13
how can you not even have email
9:15
addresses? We
9:17
found that because the subscription
9:19
system was so antiquated, subscription
9:22
notifications hadn't been going out. It
9:26
has truly, like
9:28
Greg said, there wasn't a website. There
9:31
was little to no posting on Facebook
9:33
or social media. He's
9:37
been going through, again, he'll be too
9:39
demure to say this himself. He has
9:41
been- Modest. Modest.
9:44
Okay. I wouldn't say demure.
9:47
The demure journalist. I think it's
9:49
incredible. And incredibly accelerated entrepreneurial journey
9:51
since last September, which is what,
9:54
that's just nine months of,
9:56
like I said, dragging every single
9:58
element of the operation. of this
10:01
into the modern era. Starting
10:04
with literally the two
10:06
of us sitting down with the
10:08
laptop, the famous laptop that had
10:10
all the subscription information and Greg
10:13
identified a cloud-based subscription service,
10:15
normal, and we literally sat
10:17
down for hours and hours in his office
10:20
and I read him the people's names
10:22
who were subscribers and
10:25
their address and the last
10:27
check number for when they had sent in a
10:29
subscription and all of that, a
10:32
little bit of it we could pour it over from the
10:34
old system but we had to
10:36
literally enter all the subscribers by hand into
10:38
a new system and
10:42
you had very few writers at
10:45
the paper. You're just inventing writers out of
10:47
the air or recruiting writers out of the
10:49
air to start writing for the paper. I
10:52
mean, I don't know if
10:54
I'm answering the exact question even that you
10:56
asked before but I do not wanna underestimate
10:59
how absolutely huge of a
11:01
venture this has been that he's
11:04
undertaken. Did you know when you bought
11:06
it that it was that bad? When
11:08
I started the process. Somebody
11:12
shaking your head silently, no. What
11:15
do they call that, due diligence? When I
11:17
started looking into it and trying to decide
11:19
if I wanted to buy it, the list
11:21
of things that were needing updates kept getting
11:23
longer and longer and the one that really
11:26
concerned me was the subscriptions because it was
11:28
something that I thought that was the
11:30
basis of the paper. We weren't doing a lot
11:32
of, we weren't getting a lot of advertising in
11:34
the paper so it was mostly a subscription based
11:37
set up and if we were only having
11:39
a third, two thirds, half
11:41
of the people that were actually getting the paper
11:43
were paying for it, then that's obviously problematic. So
11:48
thanks to Sam, we went through the whole
11:50
system and the laptop survived
11:53
and we were able to get everything off of
11:55
the laptop and into the cloud system before there
11:58
were any issues and then we moved. moved on
12:00
from there. And now we have a robust, modern
12:02
system. I can tell you exactly how many subscribers
12:04
we have every day. And that's – I
12:07
can see it when people subscribe online and
12:09
pay. And yes, it's much more robust now,
12:11
and it's not based on one laptop.
12:14
That's scary. Was
12:16
it even backed up? No.
12:19
There was no way to back it up. The
12:21
software was actually from a company that went under
12:23
in 2011, I think it was. So there was
12:25
no support, and there was no way
12:27
to even – I couldn't put a copy of the
12:30
program and install it on another machine and
12:33
port the information over because you couldn't get
12:35
the software. It was exciting.
12:37
Very exciting. So if the hard drive had
12:39
failed, you'd have lost everything. Wow. We
12:41
would have had to start from scratch, but I don't know how
12:44
you would even do that because we wouldn't have anybody's addresses. I
12:46
don't know how we would have done it. You'd have been standing
12:48
on the street corner with signs like, if you were subscribed. Yes.
12:52
And so in answer to your question,
12:55
did we have surprises in
12:57
terms of when – or when drug bought
12:59
the paper, the subscriber situation
13:01
was definitely a surprise because we
13:03
thought we had this many subscribers.
13:06
Well, we had this many names,
13:09
but come to find
13:11
there were only this many
13:13
paying current subscribers. So
13:15
it's been a matter of hopefully
13:17
retaining those people, getting the
13:19
people back who previously had been subscribers
13:22
but who hadn't even paid in quite
13:24
a while and then
13:26
now trying to add more
13:28
people. So like Greg said, you can literally
13:30
see every day. So at first we thought
13:32
we were going to be here. We went
13:34
way down. Now it's like, oh, a little
13:36
bit more, a little bit more, a little
13:38
bit more. That's great. So it's going up. It
13:41
is going up. Yeah. One of the things we've tried to do
13:43
is – my mantra for
13:45
the editor and our writers is to be
13:48
hyper local. So I want to know –
13:50
I literally want to know the score of
13:52
the Little League's team that just
13:54
played at the park yesterday. And
13:56
when people ask me why, I'm saying
13:59
what? What can you not find on Facebook and
14:01
what can you not find in the date and
14:03
daily news? And that's my focus, hyper
14:05
local, because that's what people
14:07
want. And this is how newspapers started. Everybody
14:10
can find out what's going on in
14:13
the world, but you're paying somebody to
14:15
go out and collect all that information and put
14:18
it in a convenient paper and
14:20
buy it. So you're buying the information that someone
14:22
has gone out and collected for you. You could do
14:24
it yourself. And that's what Facebook tried
14:26
to do for a while. But
14:28
the way the algorithms constantly change, I have best friends
14:31
that, you know, they post things on their Facebook page
14:33
and I don't see it. So I
14:35
can't you can't guarantee you're going to find things out. That
14:38
was a common question, too, is sort of
14:40
what is your content philosophy? You know, do
14:42
you have do you get the
14:45
AP stories? How do you balance sort of
14:47
the so no to the AP? That
14:49
makes sense. Like what you're saying about you can get
14:51
your national news anywhere. So you're
14:53
doing, you know, the schools and the events.
14:55
And what about like what are your content
14:58
goals? Like do you also want to hold
15:01
the local government accountable or improve the
15:03
reputation of the local community or like
15:05
what are your big picture goals? Well,
15:08
we started out trying to cover as
15:10
much hard news as possible. And
15:12
that's kind of what the paper focused on before
15:14
I bought it. And I've tried to move it
15:17
more into like the we call it homework and
15:19
recess. And it's it's more one of
15:21
the fun things that are happening around town that you don't
15:23
know about unless you have a friend who's on the tree
15:25
tree board or or if you have a friend who's in
15:27
the arts council, that kind of
15:30
thing. Of course, we're still covering hard
15:32
news and we're covering courts
15:34
and people that get convicted of things
15:36
or in fires and police reports and
15:38
things like that. But I've really tried
15:40
to lean more on the
15:43
positive things that people want because
15:46
a lot of news that's online is if
15:48
it leads. It bleeds, you know, that whole thing. And
15:52
it's not necessarily positive.
15:54
I'm not trying to like paint our local
15:56
area in some kind of artificially positive light.
15:58
I'm just trying to. to surface the things
16:01
that are happening that are local, that
16:04
are good and bad. And we tend
16:06
to lean more towards the positive news.
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Illinois. And
17:50
you said earlier that it didn't have a lot of
17:52
ads. Are you ramping up your ad sales to
17:57
supplement that part of your revenue? Or is this all
17:59
sub- Yeah, so that's
18:01
what's been interesting. So
18:05
when this whole venture started off,
18:07
I was like, Greg, have fun
18:09
with that. Sayonara, good luck. And
18:12
then I just got more and more interested by
18:14
what he was doing and wound up, you
18:16
know, it's still 100% his venture, but
18:19
I have wound up being involved in little
18:21
bits and pieces more and more.
18:24
One of the things that I did to
18:26
help out was to write a year in
18:28
review article. So in doing
18:31
so, I looked at literally every
18:33
issue from last year, which would
18:35
be 2023. And, you know, did
18:37
summaries of the key stories. And
18:40
I talked to Greg afterwards, and I
18:43
was like, Greg, there
18:45
are almost no ads in this
18:47
paper. Like, I,
18:50
again, I didn't think it was that bad.
18:52
So we have been very fortunate to we
18:54
put we put an ad in the paper
18:57
to for an ad salesperson. That's how you
18:59
do it. And we found an ad salesperson.
19:01
And she has been fantastic.
19:03
So far, she's the kind of
19:05
personality that she doesn't mind walking
19:08
in the door of a local business and
19:10
just being like, Hi, I'm Jodi from the
19:12
Tippie canoe Gazette. And I'd like
19:14
to talk to you about ad sales in the paper. So
19:17
um, good.
19:19
And I'm horrible with that kind of stuff. So
19:22
when I bought the paper, the one of the
19:24
first things I, we talked to my editor, Carla,
19:26
she's in charge of the content. And
19:28
I said, I don't really want to be in charge
19:30
of the content, you're still going to stay in that
19:32
and that's your job. And I want to expand and
19:34
grow. But one of the first things we
19:36
need to do is get somebody on ad sales. And that's,
19:40
that's helped a lot with the financial
19:42
bottom line. And then another hard decision
19:44
we made in February is we actually
19:46
doubled the price of the paper, it
19:49
went from $1 to $2. So that's
19:51
very, very exciting numbers here. But
19:54
there was some pushback on that.
19:56
And we lost some subscribers for
19:58
that because of that. And But what I've tried
20:00
to do is make it worth
20:03
their money and worth their time. So we've grown
20:05
the paper consistently. We were at about 10 pages
20:07
when I bought it and now we're almost always
20:09
16 or 18. And
20:12
I'm hoping that people are getting more twice
20:15
as much value. And that's how I like to say it. Yeah,
20:19
I was out having drinks last night and
20:21
somebody in town. We live in a very
20:23
small town. Let us be clear. I
20:26
was out having drinks last night and somebody came
20:28
up to me and was like, wow, the paper
20:30
is getting so big. It's really exciting. So, you
20:32
know, it is people
20:35
do notice that stuff. It
20:38
is like that local, that
20:40
community focused. Yeah.
20:43
And when I do get complaints, they
20:45
say, why did you double the price of the paper? And
20:48
I said, well, I've taken that money and we've hired six
20:50
new writers. And that's kind of my
20:52
angle is make the paper as
20:54
good as possible and cover our local news
20:56
as best we can. And
20:59
then we have recently started to expand
21:01
into other other
21:03
towns right around us and
21:06
add specific content writers
21:09
that can gather information from these other small
21:12
towns that don't have their own newspaper. So
21:14
we've expanded into West Milton, which is west
21:16
of here. It's a
21:18
little town and then we there's another
21:20
town called New Carlisle, which is east of here and
21:23
neither of them have papers. So
21:26
we're trying to grow those operations and it's
21:29
literally a news gathering operation because I'm trying
21:31
to find people that live there to give
21:33
me news because I can't write
21:35
news for other towns because it doesn't feel
21:37
authentic. I was wondering
21:39
that when you said that the papers in all
21:42
the nearby towns had closed. I was wondering if
21:44
you were planning to expand and this reminded
21:46
me of a person. Hailey Kotara
21:48
wrote a message when I put out a call
21:50
for questions and said they grew up in a
21:53
town of 500 people and still
21:56
subscribe to their hometown newspaper. And
21:58
said, adorably it's shared. with another
22:00
little town and it's folded differently.
22:02
So whichever town you're from is
22:04
on top. And it was so
22:06
cute. And actually they said if you want,
22:08
they will send you a copy of that newspaper if
22:11
you want it. I would love that.
22:13
That would be great. Yes. So, but
22:15
Haley wanted to know how you balance the need
22:17
to find stories with not getting up in everyone's
22:20
business. And she said that our
22:22
newspaper editor struggles with people being hesitant to
22:24
even chat with her casually or socially lest
22:26
they end up in the paper. Also saying
22:28
you were out for drinks and people were
22:30
commenting on the paper. Do you ever run
22:32
into that now? I
22:34
have had a little bit of pushback
22:37
on that. We actually, one of the things I started
22:39
early on in the paper was a new column called
22:41
the social page. And I was trying
22:43
to replicate what you see on Facebook and
22:46
have people send in information
22:48
about their weddings and parties
22:50
and anniversaries and kind of
22:52
like take it back to the
22:54
old school society page,
22:56
but without that nasty
22:58
hierarchies and all that
23:00
business. And that didn't go
23:02
well. People weren't interested in sending in information on that.
23:05
So I would have to go out and find
23:07
stuff. And then after a while we phased that
23:10
out because it just doesn't seem like people really want
23:13
to share that kind of information anymore. And if
23:15
they do, it's on Facebook with
23:17
eight or nine people and it's not
23:19
something that's public anymore. I don't
23:21
know. Yeah. At the
23:23
beginning you said you have a theory about news and Facebook.
23:25
Do you want to talk about that more? Yeah.
23:29
I feel like Facebook came in
23:31
and essentially killed the
23:33
news business, in my opinion,
23:35
when it was very popular
23:38
in the early 10s. I think
23:40
2010 through 2015
23:43
we saw a lot of news getting
23:45
moved from local newspapers onto the web
23:47
and onto, not onto the websites
23:49
of those local newspapers, but the actual news
23:52
was being taken and co-opted
23:55
and just being shared on Facebook. People
23:58
were sharing information locally. The
32:45
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get more done. if
38:00
you're going to use AI in the production
38:02
of the paper in any way. And then
38:04
they also wanted to know if you had
38:06
any way or any plan
38:08
to sort of protect yourself from AI. I
38:10
know there was that story about a fake
38:14
voicemail that implicated a high school, I
38:16
think it was a high school principal
38:18
who supposedly said something awful
38:20
on voicemail, but hadn't, it was AI
38:22
generated. So they sort of wanted
38:24
to know if you're going to use AI and also
38:26
if you're going to sort of protect your news source
38:28
from AI and somehow. Well,
38:31
at this point, absolutely not. And that's
38:33
just an editorial decision that we're making
38:35
on our end. Again, we're
38:37
going back to the hyper local and
38:39
the trusted sources and we
38:42
want people to read the story. And when
38:44
I see that person that read the story on
38:46
the street the next day, I don't want them
38:49
to call me out and say, hey, I could
38:51
tell you that was AI written or something like
38:53
that. We want to be hyper local and we
38:55
want to make sure everything we have in the
38:57
paper is authentic. Another thing that we started doing
38:59
when I bought the paper is that everything gets
39:02
a solid proofread edit through
39:05
the system before it goes into the paper just
39:07
to bump up the quality levels.
39:10
And we have used
39:12
AI visualization tools on a few things.
39:14
We were working on a redesign
39:17
of the logo of the paper and I needed
39:19
to send some ideas to the designer. So I
39:21
did, I used it for that just to kind
39:23
of get some blue sky concepts
39:25
of what I think the new logo could
39:27
look like, but no,
39:29
certainly going to have that designed
39:31
by a human. I think they,
39:33
I like them better. Right. So
39:35
to finish up, I have just
39:37
a few fun questions. So Steve
39:40
Ryan from Facebook wanted to know if you've
39:42
ever had the opportunity yet to yell, stop
39:45
the presses. No,
39:48
but I am telling you this is the coolest
39:50
thing ever. I drive
39:52
up to pick up the paper
39:54
every Tuesday morning. So it goes
39:56
to press Monday night. So we
39:58
do have a great down
46:00
the road and I said, please send that
46:02
to me. Did anybody get pictures? Because that
46:04
sells paper. Sorry, it does and it's hilarious.
46:06
And that's the kind of stuff AI is
46:08
not going to come up with, I don't
46:10
think. That was my
46:12
first thought. Did they have pictures? Well,
46:16
thank you so much. The last question
46:18
is actually an important one. It's from
46:20
Aaron Moran, who's a grammar-paloozian. And
46:23
Aaron said, other than subscribing, what
46:25
can regular folks do to support
46:28
local and independent journalism? Well,
46:33
from my perspective, it would
46:35
be to subscribe because you really do
46:37
support the people who are putting the
46:39
paper together every day. And that subscription
46:41
money might feel like a waste, but
46:43
it hires, I'm using that literally today
46:45
to pay a writer that
46:47
we just brought on two weeks ago
46:49
to write about stuff that's happening
46:51
with the school board in another town. And
46:54
I could not cover that story without
46:56
that person. And I couldn't get
46:59
that. People don't freelance for free.
47:02
It's a weird word. People
47:04
do not want to just
47:06
donate their time and money forever. They
47:09
want to be able to get paid for their work.
47:11
And I want to pay them for their work because they're doing
47:13
good work. So a subscription would
47:15
be good if you're in a local town
47:17
and you still have a paper and you
47:19
want to keep that paper in business, I
47:22
would run an ad. That's another huge thing.
47:24
If you've got a business and you sell
47:26
tires in your local town and
47:29
your paper closes, think
47:31
about how you would get the word out
47:34
about your spring sale on your tires.
47:36
It's almost impossible to do without a local
47:38
paper. And the way to keep your local
47:40
paper is to keep it in business. And
47:42
to do that, you have to support it.
47:44
It's just like any other local
47:47
business. If you've got a restaurant you like and
47:50
they close, it's because enough people didn't go
47:52
there. And it's pretty simple. Yeah. And it
47:54
just occurred to me, if you already subscribe,
47:56
we'll be sure to tell the advertisers you
47:59
saw their ad. ads in the paper too,
48:01
so they know. That's a great point. Yes.
48:04
If you ever, if you go into
48:06
a store because you saw an ad
48:08
in the local paper, let the shop
48:10
owner or the business know that you're
48:12
there because of that ad. That's hugely
48:15
valuable. Yeah. It feels like you're doing
48:17
something from the 30s. And
48:19
it seems weird that I'm going to go to
48:21
a store and buy something I could just get
48:23
on Amazon. But I do go to stores and
48:25
buy things that I can get on Amazon because
48:27
I like the idea a
48:29
store I can go to. So
48:31
it's kind of the same mindset. If you like having a
48:33
local paper, you have to support it. Yeah.
48:36
Well, I just can't tell you the amount
48:38
of goodwill that I felt pouring out from
48:40
all the commenters. Everyone was so excited to
48:42
hear you were doing this and wished you,
48:44
even though they were maybe worried or wondering,
48:46
they wished you so much
48:48
goodwill and success. But people really
48:51
are excited about what you're doing
48:53
and want you to succeed. So
48:55
to wrap up, why don't you tell people where they can find you? They're
49:00
listening and suddenly they want to subscribe, even if
49:03
maybe they're not in your town or where
49:06
can people find you? Absolutely. If
49:08
you want an example of a cute little small
49:10
town newspaper to show to your friends, we're
49:13
the tipgazette.com. Just go
49:15
to tipgazette.com. And if you're in the Dayton area
49:17
and you want a paper, there is
49:20
a nice list on the website of where
49:22
it is for sale. We just added two
49:24
new retailers today. I'm very excited about, including
49:26
one of our best donuts shops is going
49:28
to start carrying the paper. And
49:30
I'm like, yes. Awesome. So yeah, that's the best way
49:32
to support it would be to follow us on Facebook
49:35
and Twitter and Instagram and then subscribe to the paper
49:37
so you can see what it's like. And
49:39
take that paper, printed paper
49:41
that you're going to get in the mail. It will actually
49:43
physically come to your house. It's kind of weird. And
49:46
take that paper around and see if
49:48
you can get one started in your
49:50
town. I really do think a local
49:53
paper is a backbone important thing. It's
49:55
like city council or a parks department
49:57
or a school board. really
50:00
something every small town needs,
50:02
really. That's tip,
50:04
is that with two P's, right? Yeah.
50:06
Yes. I'll put a link to that in the show notes,
50:09
and so people can find it if they want to look for it.
50:12
Sam and Greg, thank you so much. Thank
50:15
you for having us. Awesome. Thank you so much. It was great to talk
50:17
to you. The
50:23
Fourth of July savings are happening now at
50:25
The Home Depot. So
50:28
get ready to go big with backyard
50:30
barbecues for all your friends and family.
50:34
Level up with the next grill four burner propane gas
50:36
grill, now $199 from The Home Depot. Its
50:40
extra large cooking surface is perfect for
50:42
super sized entertaining. Take
50:46
your grilling to the next level with Fourth of
50:48
July savings at The Home Depot. How doers
50:50
get more done. My
50:55
name is Nicole Kidman, and I've wanted
50:57
to do a rom-com for so long,
50:59
and along came A Family Affair. It's
51:01
a great romantic comedy, and it's laugh
51:03
out loud. If you feel like, I
51:06
just need to curl up and watch
51:08
something that feels very comforting. It's the
51:10
Netflix experience. There's laughter and there's joy.
51:12
That's A Family Affair. A
51:14
Family Affair, starring Nicole Kidman, Zach Efron
51:17
and Joey King, directed by Richard LaGravinace,
51:19
Rated PG-13, sexual content, partial
51:21
nudity and some strong language, only on Netflix
51:23
June 28th.
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