Guides and Tutorials
Starting a Metro Community Newspaper
We offer the following only as a guide for you to start your own Metro Community newspaper. While the general structure is informative, every person or organization has their own way of adding their own special touch to any endeavor.
Choose a link to jump ahead to that section of the tutorial.
- What It Takes to Get Started
- Potential Income with a Metro Community Newspaper
- The Metro Community Newspaper Thinking
- Printing Frequency
- Printing Quantity
- Newspaper Pages
- Raising Revenue Through Selling Ads
- Finding Content
- Additional Things to Consider
- Distributing Your Metro Community Newspaper
- Growing Your Newspaper Business
What It Takes to Get Started
The goal of Metro Community Newspaper is to serve a city or a section of a large metropolitan city that does not have any real source for local news or a good means of connecting with relevant products and services offered in the area. Typically, a town with a population of 50,000 on up is the target for this particular business.
The initial investment of starting this new metro newspaper may include the following:
- A mockup newspaper to show advertisers. 50 copies of a 4-page, color newspapers ($129).
- A registered trade name of your newspaper or business with the Secretary of State (optional, $10-$40).
- Time. Time to do the proper research, sell the ads, and design your newspaper.
Your first issue will be your hardest. You’ll not only be doing everything for the first time, you will need to do some things in the beginning that you won’t do later on. For example, it would be wise to make a mockup of your newspaper before you print your first issue. You will take this mockup to various businesses to solicit advertising from them. Here are some things to consider at the very beginning:
- Be ready to work hard. You’ll get out of this as much as you put in. This could easily become a full time job with a nice income, but the harder you work the more profitable it can be.
- Do the research into your city. Know the demographics. Know the dynamics involved. Learn about any relationships your community has with other businesses and entities. Know the key industries and what is important to the welfare of your community.
- Decide what segment you are going to reach. The odds are, if you live in a large city, you will need to specialize your newspaper and offer unique content to a specific target group.
- Know the advertising market. Know how much you should charge for each ad. What are businesses already paying to reach your town? Know that you can offer them a means of reaching people no one else can offer, either through price, reach, or content.
- You want, if at all possible, to get your advertisers to email you their ad in a jpg, 300 DPI format. Some may not have this and either they or you will have to build it.
- You will need to familiarize yourself with design software and newspaper design (LINKS). Have a mockup newspaper created and printed so that you have something tangible to show potential advertisers.
Potential Income with a Metro Community Newspaper
A Metro Community Newspaper can generate either a part time income or a full time income. It all depends upon the work and effort you’re willing to put into it. Generally speaking, your newspaper should have a minimum of 8 pages and be filled with relevant content to the people living in your city. You may even want to create a niche market so that you are not competing with other news outlets or sources.
- Averaging 4 ads per page, you can sell 32 ads for an 8-page newspaper. Averaging $200 a sold ad, you can generate $6,400 of income each month. Your print costs for 15,000 newspapers would be approximately $1,350. Assuming you distribute them yourself, you could net around $5,000 each month. You would need to sell 7 ads just to break even.
- Averaging 3 ads per page, you can sell 36 ads for a 12-page newspaper. Averaging $150 a sold ad, you can generate $5,400 in income each month. Your printing costs for 20,000 newspapers would be approximately $1,500. You could potentially net $3,900 each month. You would need to sell 10 ads to break even.
- Averaging 4 ads per page, you can sell 64 ads for a 16-page newspaper. Averaging $100 per sold ad, you can generate $6,400 in income each month. Your print cost for 50,000 newspapers would be approximately $3,000. You would net $3,200 a month in profit. You’d need to sell 30 ads to break even.
Changing the number of ads you sell or the price at which you sell them will change these numbers. If you choose to mail your newspapers EDDM or find other ways to distribute them will also change the income potential. It may or may not be difficult to sell 32 to 64 ads each month. But even if you sell only half that number, you can still make a decent part time income.
The Metro Community Newspaper Thinking
With this type of newspaper, your goal is to target a forgotten niche within your greater community. You must think beyond the income or else your mindset will be swayed and diverted. What need is missing that people are hungry for. Do you have inside information in a particular industry or service? Is there a need for a newspaper that covers food, health, beauty, religion, or a family dynamic? You want to be unique and offer something that your readers can’t readily get anywhere else.
That’s the key. People can look around online to get the majority of their news, so you must offer something that no one else is. You want to fill a need. If you aren’t filling a need, you will probably struggle since people won’t have a need for your newspaper.
A successful metro community newspaper is usually niched, specialized. It looks to provide stories and information that would be difficult to get under normal circumstances. Once you know the purpose of your newspaper and what niche you will be focused on, you can get started.
Printing Frequency
You will want to start at once a month. Some people feel there is too much time that elapses and the news they provide will be outdated, but often that is just not the case. You will be writing about stories no one else is talking about. If you are niched, you will be providing information in a specialized way that no one else is doing. You will stay relevant.
Gathering content and writing the stories takes time. If you do this once a month, then it can be done by a single person, but the moment you go to twice a month or weekly, you are looking to expand your staff to meet the demand. The operation becomes much more demanding at that point, and we recommend you only go to a more frequent distribution if you have the infrastructure to support it—and your readership is demanding it. Let demand dictate your frequency of printing.
Printing Quantity
If your population is significant, target a segment of it. If, for example, you are niched in the food industry, then target diners. In this case, you can print any quantity you wish and then distribute them in restaurants for their patrons to take and read.
You may also want to target particular zip codes and then rotate each month to reach new readership. We recommend you have no more than 3 segments to rotate through.
Keep in mind that the value of your newspaper to advertisers is its reach. If you are printing 200 copies at a price of $50 for an ad in that 200 copies, that is nowhere as interesting as a $500 ad that has a distribution of 100,000. Printing 100,000 may be too much initially, but you get the idea. Advertisers are more interested in the quantity you are printing than in the number of pages in your newspaper.
Newspaper Pages
We recommend starting with at least 8 pages. This way you’ll have enough space to sell plenty of ads and the expense between 4 pages and 8 pages is not much greater. Eight pages is a manageable number to start with. Consider that each page will average 750 words along with ads and images. So at 8 pages, you may need to write 6,000 words, sell up to 32 ads, and find 16 images that go along with your articles. At 16 pages, the work doubles, and printing monthly means this is still a one-person operation.
As you grow and you gain resources for your content, it will be easier to expand your newspaper to include more pages. We’ve found that over ambitious people often bite off more than they can chew and end up getting discouraged. Start small and let customer and advertiser demand grow your newspaper.
Remember, however, advertisers are more interested in the quantity you print—your reach—than they are in how many pages you are printing.
Raising Revenue Through Selling Ads
A Metro Community Newspaper is generally targeted to a segment of the population. This means that you need to find advertisers that want to reach the same population group. Start with business owners you know and then ask them for two referrals. You can then go armed with a name to pitch to the referrals. Here are some more thoughts to keep in mind:
- Be armed with as many statistics about the demographics of your target group as you can. You need to be able to tell an advertiser the reach of your newspaper.
- Always approach the person who can pull the trigger on the ad. Don’t talk to an employee or a manager that can’t make this decision.
- Don’t be bothered when someone says no. That’s part of the deal. Shake that off and go on to the next one.
- Have a copy or mockup of your newspaper to show a potential advertiser. In fact, it may be wise to let the mockup newspaper contain all the information you would use in a sales pitch and then leave the copy with the business owner.
- Use contracts with discounts to lock down advertising money for consecutive issues.
- Try to sell more than just ads. Sell a written article about the advertiser or sell space for the advertiser to write an article of their own.
- Don’t forget to remind owners that advertising costs are tax deductible.
- Be excited about what you are doing. Impart your vision to the business owner and let them buy into both you and your vision.
- Read our Selling Ad Tips Guide for more help.
Finding Content
Gathering the content and news will most likely be your biggest challenge, even more challenging than selling the ads. You will need interesting content that matters to your target group of readers. You don’t need to put national news in your newspaper. If local news can be found easily on TV or another source, then you will want to specialize in stories no one would hear about if it wasn’t for your newspaper.
Here are some ideas of where to gather content:
- From niche community contributors! In your first issue, make an appeal to anyone in your target group who wants to write or who has some information that others might find interesting—include kids in the offer too where appropriate. If your newspaper is about health, then find people with a similar passion and let them help you. Offer incentives for those who will help write. Many people would just love to see their name in print.
- From businesses and services that specialize in your niche. In many cases, you can actually sell the space to them as it gives them exposure.
- Use your demographics to suggest stories to write. Armed with this information, you’ll be able to write things that appeal to a specific demographic. If you know, for example, that immunizations in your group has fallen, then you have a topic to write about in your health newspaper.
- Interview people. Everyone has a story, and when you let that person tell their story, you’ve just given them a reason to love your newspaper—and you’ve got content.
- Make it easy for people to write or call you with information.
- Check out Places to Get Free Content.
Additional Things to Consider
Once you have your Metro Newspaper going, it will be easier to maintain. Now you just need a constant flow of content and new advertising to replace or grow the ones you already have. Be constantly on the lookout for new ways to spruce up your newspaper. Look into adding contests and other interactive content.
Most importantly, learn as you go. Identify weak points where you can streamline, cut costs, reduce the amount of time you spend on simple things, and so on.
Look to get other people directly involved to reduce the workload on your shoulders. Get people to write articles, to send you photos, and to help distribute them if need be.
Distributing Your Metro Community Newspaper
Because your newspaper is more specialized, you will need to distribute your newspaper where your target group can be found. If your newspaper is on health, then medical facilities, doctor offices, clinics, and so forth would be ideal places to distribute your newspaper. If your niche is about cuisine, then restaurants and dining would be your target distribution points.
You can, of course, drop them off at people’s houses or find friendly businesses that might be willing to carry your newspapers to allow people to take.
USPS Every Door Direct Mailing Services can show you the exact number of stops in any particular carrier route if you think mailing them is a solution.
If you do not mail your newspapers, then you will need to find other ways of distributing them such as leaving them door to door, putting them in restaurants, libraries, waiting rooms, and so on. Our How To Distribute Your Newspaper Guide might be of help.
Growing Your Newspaper Business
Once you are established and growing, you will want to continue to grow your business and brand. You may want to consider offering a website where those in the town could sign up for and get specialized content and even help provide you with content.
Ultimately, if it is working well, you can branch out into other population segments and continue doing what you are doing right now.
Need Some Inspiration?
The following real newspapers created by our customers can give you an idea of what is possible. Check them out and feel free to use some of the design and content ideas in your own newspaper.