Our issue #3 is out!
So now we're on the verge of beating the 3-issue-limit curse of street papers. ;)
I'm committed and my team is committed, though as you know this is an absolutely exhausting process at times - one that makes you feel, at worse, that you need to be, well, committed.
Our main problem, as I see it, is still vendor recruitment. I read your advice to Columbus and that helps. We need bigger incentives. And I like the 50-papers once a vendor recruits a permanent vendor who sells 50 papers.
We have less than 10 vendors with less than 3 of them being reliable. We've trained probably more than 50 - handed out 15 free papers and a temp badge to all.
I know this can work. Nashville is certainly large enough. It's just very discouraging to feel like I'm putting so much work in to a product that is not seen.
Besides the vendor situation, we need to fundraise and sell advertising. That will come. We just don't have enough manpower to do it all right now. I sure can't.
On the plus side...
We've survived, so far, on donations that we haven't really needed to solicit and little-to-no advertising. Our content has been free-flowing and above par. When we started, I expected a 8-page issue. The first was 16. Second was 20 and third 24. I think I want to hold it there, or even reduce back to 16 and print more frequently. We're on about a 6-week cycle right now. As you all know, it's amazingly difficult to make a living and do this on the side for free...
So...I sit here and trust that the good things will continue to go well, and the weak things will improve. And that, in the end, this is all worth it. Right?
4 comments:
It's smarter to go smaller and print more than vice versa. Go for quality over quantity.
It's extremely hard for vendors to sell a newspaper that's a week old much less a month or more.
Vendors will stay with the newspaper if there's a timely product to sell, but if someone is waiting six-weeks until the next paper you're going to get people who only sell for a week and then drop off - maybe they'll come back, maybe they won't.
Most papers starting off shoot for monthly - anything beyond this is almost impossible to sustain concerning a vendor program and regular readership.
Flyer every social service area in a 5 mile radius, send e-mails with recuitment flyers to anyone working with people on the beat, and if possible give other vendors either business cards or quarter sheet flyers to give to friends, etc on the beat. Word of mouth can be one of your best resources, but you have to provide vendors with something to pass along - where and when vendor orientations, etc.
If you've already done all this, do it again...
Hang in there. That's what our vendor situation looked like at the beginning too. Lately, we've been doing 13,000 copies or more a week. Anything you can do to promote a sense of community for the vendors you have will help a lot. If they have the sense that you're all in it together it will make a huge difference.
Thanks to both you guys.
My question for Street Roots is:
"It's extremely hard for vendors to sell a newspaper that's a week old much less a month or more. "
Depending on how you date the paper, how would customers know if the paper is old? Our information, for the most part, has a long shelf life.
We're not so much depending on regular customers at this point as trying to recruit new vendors and get the word out to new customers. When you only have a very few vendors on the streets the whole city is game and the paper is new to the entire population. Not to mention all the tourists in Downtown Nashville.
I mean, I'm likely naive and, well, wrong, but of all the vendors we've trained and never seen again, I don't imagine we would have kept very many of them by coming out with more papers. Apparently they couldn't even sell the first 15.
We're doing the best we can. Especially for a completely volunteer staff. And all-in-all we're doing well. Even if we're only coming out once every 6 weeks.
I'll defend 'quality' to the death of this paper. Sure, we may need to cut size down to a more manageable page count to come out more often, but I still think we'd be shooting ourselves in the foot with lower quality. That's something everyone involved in this project has received praise for. The community that has received the paper has been very surprised at the high quality of our content.
The goal is to bump that up to monthly as soon as we can. In the meantime. I've got it. Vendor incentives, more and more canvassing and a sense of community. Let me know if you guys think of anything else. ;)
Thanks so much!
Love your product, SR, btw...
Sorry I haven't been in the game on the blog.
"Depending on how you date the paper, how would customers know if the paper is old? Our information, for the most part, has a long shelf life."
It's great your paper has a long shelf life with your publication schedule - that will help out vendors a lot.
Saying that, I assume if your content is high quality that one customer that buys the paper today will ultimately know the paper is old tomorrow. Building relationships with regular customers is part of what makes a newspaper successful and breaks stereotypes - all things you can use to your advantage.
"We're not so much depending on regular customers at this point as trying to recruit new vendors and get the word out to new customers."
You can't have one without the other. All it takes is one or two vendors to light up a particular locations and bam - papers start to fly.
The majority of our vendors sell the minority of papers - for better or worse, something we are working on. The vast majority of our sales come from a rather small portion of our vendors. For those vendors, they rely on the paper being timely and professional.
Keep up the great work. And put us on your mailing list!
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