Times go on, and sometimes what we learn can hurt us
By: Douglas Heizer
It’s fall again and the season is really just beginning. In a few months, The Boca Raton Tribune will celebrate its second anniversary. Hard to believe and, let me tell you, it’s hard to make it happen!
I will take advantage of the fact that my dear friend and our managing editor Dale King is at home recovering from surgery and I will write more than he allows me to do on a weekly basis!
We are very proud of the newspaper we deliver to you every week, actually, every day. We can’t forget our online edition! We are the only real Boca Raton newspaper. By that I mean we are the only newspaper that covers community news from east to west of Boca Raton, and that is owned and operated by local people.
During my time as the publisher, I’ve learned a lot of new things and met a lot of new people. This makes me very happy because we are focused on being your local newspaper, not just another newspaper that prints just to get ads and make money.
Do we have competition? Yes and no. Nobody does what we do for our community. We are working to establish a long term relationship with the readers and with the business owners that support us. We want to be not only your closest neighbor but closest friend.
Our sales team is not here to “take your money” and go away, they are here to find a way to support your business the same way you support ours with ads. We are happy to report your business events, we are happy to let people know about your new improvement or about your new product that just arrived. Your ad is not only a block of print that you paid for, for us, having your ad in the paper means more. It means that you want to see your local newspaper alive and we appreciate that.
We are happy to see our paid mail subscription growing every week, we are thankful for all of you that support us that way.
But I need to be quite honest. Not all things I learned these past two years made me happy. Some hurt me deeply.
I learned that a lot of people, non-profit organizations and business owners look at the paper as only a way to promote themselves. They don’t care about us; they don’t care about how much it costs to keep the paper alive. They don’t even know the difference between us and some other newspapers out there. They keep sending us press releases to make their business well known, and when we ask about ads, they say: “We don’t place ads at the newspapers.” Some say, “We don’t believe in local newspapers”. This is really awkward because if they don’t believe in newspapers, why do they send press releases to us?
If you like our newspaper and if you want us to keep doing what we are doing, I want to give you a challenge. Do you know how much a business card ad at the only real Boca Raton newspaper costs? $35. Do you think $35 per week is too much to support your local paper? If you think it’s worth it, let businesses know you would like to see them support our city newspaper and keep it alive.
I know a lot of you either owns a business or is in charge of marketing in your business or organization. I challenge you to give one of our advertisers a call and ask them if what I said about partnership and support is true or false. We will be here when someone from another state, another city comes and tries to put you out of business, to take your customers away. We will stand with you, we will support you. Nobody else will. Nobody can be proud to be local like we are.
We need your support!
