This change saved us some non-trivial time and effort in invoicing and processing payments. Most of the advertisers affected were running the ad for months or years at a time anyway.

When it was time for a longtime advertiser using that particular offering to renew, they said they wouldn’t because it was “getting too expensive.”

We tried to explain:

22 * 52 = 1,144

95 * 12 = 1,140

We had also started offering a “buy 11, get 1 month free” incentive, so:

95 * 11 = 1,045

But 95 is larger than 22 and people are sensitive to basic number comparisons, sometimes without regard for the full context.

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Before:

After:

It’s a font for the newspaper’s name that we were already using most other places, including on our website.

I suspect a few folks have noticed, but no one has said anything.

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Dear Valued Printing Customer,

We are writing to inform you of an upcoming increase in printing plate costs, due to a newly implemented 15% tariff imposed by the U.S. government on imported aluminum products. This tariff applies to all finished goods containing aluminum, including aluminum lithographic printing plates.

As a result, the cost of each printing plate used on our press will increase by $1.52, which reflects the additional cost passed on to us by our manufacturer. Please note: we will not add any markup to this increased cost.

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“Were those public budget hearing details in a legal notice email message we received, or was that in that one shared Google Doc, or did it just make it straight in to a news story we published, or maybe it was in a PDF we’d tucked away in a folder?” It could take someone many browser tabs and clicks to find out, and that’s the last thing you want to do when trying to put together coverage on a deadline.

To solve this, we partnered with the great folks at Tighten to build a global search tool. It’s an internal Laravel application that allows our team to enter a search query and see results across multiple tools, all in one place:

(Redacted for public sharing, obviously the real results are not.)

The results page is a flexible Livewire component so there’s a toggle to show the entries in a more standard search engine results format:

There’s a simple admin interface to manage and add new sources to search:

Permissions management is mostly controlled through our single sign on authentication system, so we can designate access to a given tool’s search results based on user role.

(Interestingly to perhaps no one but me, one of our core tools had no API endpoint to search all records by keyword, so I ended up on a side quest to build a second Laravel app that just archives all records from that tool in another local searchable database. It periodically queries a “what records have been created or changed in the last few minutes” API endpoint that was available to bring the information in and then turns around and provides a usable search API endpoint.)

This all required a significant investment of time and money to get in place, but for an organization that’s all about finding, organizing and publishing information in useful ways, I think it was also a significant quality of life improvement for the team, and I think it will serve us well over time.

I have thoughts of releasing the software as open source. If anyone’s interested, please let me know.

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It refers readers to an online landing page with more detail about each trust factor:

This is all informed and inspired by the work of the folks at Trusting News, who study and develop resources around building the public’s trust in journalists, journalism and news media. Ever since hearing one of their team member speak at a conference years ago, I’ve been eager to incorporate their guidance into our local news ecosystem.

Our paper is fortunate to have already built what I believe is a high level of trust with our readership and the broader community. But at the same time, I don’t know that most of our readers think very much about why they might trust us, or what would have to change for that trust to erode, until they encounter a story that is substantially in conflict with their own understanding of what’s true.

So, I think it’s worth being proactive to communicate as publicly and transparently as we can about what we do to earn and maintain trust in our reporting. Then, if and when people have occasion to question it, they have some information from us to consider.

Or, maybe it’ll just be helpful if they’re trying to explain to a friend or neighbor why our newspaper is different from other sources of information that someone might encounter.

The post Trusting news appeared first on stumble.press.

• 2 news reporters, one of whom also leads our print page layout work each week
• 1 sports reporter
• 4-5 contract photographers
• 1 receptionist and customer service rep
• 1 publisher/owner/editor
• 1 legal ad / public notice coordinator
• 1 contract advertising sales coordinator
• 1 contract digital editor
• 1 print page layout contractor
• 1 contract editor
• 1 contract designer
• 1 contract proofreader
• 1 contract podcast host
• 1 contract video producer
• 2 delivery and retail sales logistics contractors
• 1 facilities and janitorial contractor

This is an oversimplification of role descriptions in some cases; most of us do a little bit of a lot of different things.

Many of the contract roles and a few of the staff roles are part-time. Several of them are remote roles.

We occasionally use additional contractors for one-off special projects.

In some cases it would be more cost-effective and efficient to combine roles in to staff positions that are full time. But with challenges finding and retaining folks to fill those combined roles, it’s worked out okay for now to spread things out over more part-time/contract roles.

For me personally, managing 20 different employment/contract relationships can be a lot. There’s some delegation — reporters often manage photographer assignments, for example — but we probably need more and perhaps another person focused on team management and administration. And we always need more reporters.

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Mail and packages are being delayed by days, weeks and months, and sometimes just go missing. Animals are even dying.

For us at the newspaper, this manifests itself in daily phone calls from some of our subscribers who are frustrated that they can’t receive our publication in a timely manner.

Most folks are understanding, but even the most patient and loyal subscriber can’t be expected to renew their subscription if the paper isn’t showing up reliably.

While the relative number of subscribers affected is small for the moment, I see it as a fundamental threat to our business, given that mail delivery is likely the only way we can affordably get the paper to our readers.

Here’s the column I wrote about this issue in last week’s paper:

Postal delivery woes hit some WWN subscribers
By Chris Hardie

Most of our subscribers receive their Western Wayne News in a timely manner via our partnership with the U.S. Postal Service. But we know that some of you have been experiencing an increase in delays or times when the newspaper doesn’t arrive at all. We are in regular contact with the USPS about this, and they are telling us that due to staffing, infrastructure and other challenges, there is a general overload of mail-handling capacity in Indiana right now, and it may be some time before things get better.

All of the papers we mail out go to the Cambridge City post office on Wednesday mornings, and we think their team does a great job. But some papers destined for addresses in or near Wayne County take a detour to a USPS facility in Indianapolis first; we’ve asked why and there doesn’t seem to be a good reason. From there, how fast it’s processed and sent back out to this side of the state seems to vary widely; a customer told us last week that she just received a paper we mailed out to her in November.

Here’s the thing: we rely entirely on USPS to deliver the paper, so when they’re having issues, it concerns us greatly. We are a small enough customer that we don’t have the influence to demand improvements, and yet we also don’t have any other option but to keep working with them on it. There’s no team of newspaper carriers we can pay to go door-to-door as a backup option.

If you experience a mail delivery issue, please contact us about it, either by emailing contact@westernwaynenews.com or calling our office at (765) 478-5448 x1. We report each late or missing paper to the USPS. They’ve also told us that it’s useful for you to contact your local post office directly.

We appreciate your understanding and flexibility as we try to navigate these challenges.

The post Postal woes appeared first on stumble.press.

It ended up being quite a wide-ranging conversation about what it’s been like to become the owner and publisher of a print newspaper in the midwestern US while bringing my software development and business management skills to the mix.

The episode is available in both video and audio formats:

(We talked a lot about the tech stack I’ve built and the processes and tooling involved, which was really fun, but a related regret in hindsight is that I didn’t say more about the work of my amazing team of colleagues who are the real engine that makes it all possible. I know I’ve been able to highlight them in other contexts, but I hope no one comes away from the episode with the misconception that you can run a newspaper like a one-person SaaS business; you can’t!)

I hope you get a chance to listen to it! Thanks, Steve and Dan, for having me on.

The post PublishPress podcast interview appeared first on stumble.press.

I’ve learned a lot from listening to it, from big picture thinking about the nature of what we do to nuts and bolts details of the daily operations of a newsroom to everything in between.

Listening to an episode where Michael interviews Simon Galperin about a new model for local news funding prompted me to reach out to Simon and connect around experiments in local news aggregation. That connection has grown and became the foundation of my journalism degree program’s capstone creative project.

Indeed, one could probably spend quite a long time swimming around in the conversations, knowledge, links, references and questions that the podcast has surfaced. I know I’ll never have the time to fully appreciate all of the episodes, but I’ll probably still try.

Michael offers some final thoughts, including:

What I’ve learned in podcasting for 12 years about the changing state of media is that it will continue to change and we will need to continue to change with it. That means mastering new skills, thinking new ideas and challenging ourselves to do better.

Collaborate. Innovate. Question authority. When a person of color or someone in a marginalized community says to you that they’re being prejudiced against, listen to them, acknowledge their truth and report their story.

This is the parent in me: Do good journalism, yes. But be smart, be safe and don’t be afraid to ask for help. It may feel like the world is on your shoulders. It’s not. Rotten, troubling things come in many sizes. Remember, all news is local. Right the wrong that’s in front of you.

Thank you, Michael, for all that you’ve done for journalism, publishing and local news.

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