DFW suburban chain bankrupt

There are a couple of really good prep maagzines in Dallas, IIRC.

 

They are didn't know they were shutting down all their papers? When was this announced?

 

You can make a decent living owning and operating a weekly and in fact, the circ. numbers of weeklies have remained fairly steady. Two people can run a 3,000 or less. Any more than that and you'd need to add a little staff, maybe a part-timer. Weeklies are the perfect mom and pop operation, but make no mistake, you'll work your ass off. You and the misses will write most of the front page, opinion and briefs, take all the photos and do all the layout and sell ads. You'll also take a few classifieds that walk in and deliver the printed product to the post office each week. You can line up country reporters (I think now they call this citizen journalism) to send in articles about their communities. Doesn't cost you a cent. Same thing with church news ... get ladies from all the churches to submit weekly news items ... again for nothing. Plus filler from the county extension agent and your local state rep. As for sports, I'd feature everything since gamers are old news by the time you're printed. I'd have a little web presence with just the front page articles and maybe sports from Friday night football and the midweek basketball games. Just call the coach, get a little info up on the web (other than football, which should be staffed).

That's my business plan, which comes from past experience at very successful and award-winning weeklies in Texas. They still follow the same format (except for the vacation part), have had no cutbacks or layoffs and still run very smoothly.

As for vacation, you close two weeks in the summer and one week after the massive letters to Santa issue in December. Three weeks vacation is about the most you can do. You sell your subs based on three weeks outta the year without a paper and you also negotiate that into the contract with your printer. To save money on printing, I'd go all black and white unless an advertiser bought the color. And I'd special section as much as possible ... about 1 a month.

 

Nobody said anything about the papers shutting down. The company filed for Chapter 11.

 

It was sarcasm. Read the final note on the other post about "the troops at the community papers are standing down."

 

blue font, dammit. blue font.

 

really? where?