Slapping the Hand That Feeds You

I had a conversation with a colleague from a more traditional paper today. She told me about an interview she had done with a company that provides security for schools. The company is looking to land a contract with an area school district.

She said that her editor would likely not run the story because she'd feel it was just a marketing pitch for the company. This illustrates an attitude among most print media publications that I just don't understand.

I'll focus on small regionals because that's what I'm most familiar with. Small businesses are the ones who keep the paper in existance. It's through their ad revenue that payroll is met, the rent gets paid, the electricity stays on, etc. Yet an editor would shun a story because it might be helpful to a business? I'm not going to name the paper or the editor because this attitude is actually the prevailing one among small newspaper editors. They're are loathe to do anything that might be construed as "free advertising".

In The South Side Business News, we're all about the blatant and unapologetic promotion of business, particularly the small business. IBM and Walmart get plenty of attention. We want to provide a spotlight for Fountain Valley Mechanical and The Sound Shop and the like. The fact that most papers wont do this actually provided me with my niche. We encourage area businesses to send us updates on their activities, products, employees, etc. Of course, the story still has to be interesting and they're run on a space available basis, but since we don't do community interest, politics, death, disease and mayhem, we make a lot of space available.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, this has not resulted in decreased interest in paid advertising. To the contrary. It turns out the public at large is really interested in the goings on of local shops and the people who own, run and work in them. There are hundreds of small businesses in the area and only a handful are going to have stories published in any given month. The demand for space still far exceeds the supply. The key, as always, it good content. All stories are edited as I see fit, and nobody gets to proof or approve them prior to publication.