The Augusta Breeze, Vaughn Weekly Report, and Great Falls Gazette: Lights. What do those three small newspapers have in common? All feature stories and content are from The Great Falls Gazette, and they spotlight news and stories important to small towns and neighborhoods.
The Great Falls Gazette: Lights was started a few months ago and was simply a way of showing what’s in the paper without giving the cow away. In fact, up until about a month ago, it was slated to be replaced with Foxys Market. As uptake with the classified didn’t happen as fast as we hopped, we kept the Lights and redesigned our layout. This led to great acceptance in our communities. At that point. we were taking stock of what we had and could do to help our small communities. The Neighborhood Papers project came out of that brainstorming session.
We wanted to bring the Augusta Breeze Back, but we could go weeks without a main story because the town is rather small. Likewise, we wanted to do more other small communities in our area. All of these little communities are people with news and events that many large news organizations ignore. We wanted to find a way to make it work for these areas to have a free paper for their community.
We came up with a merging of Foxys Market, Buzz Events, and local news and advertising. These small papers all have stories that are in the Great Falls Gazette but are curated for the area. Additionally, proceeds from the Market and advertising would help offset the cost of the paper. Because we are using stores we’ve already invested in, we are simply using the local papers to help distribute our Foxys Market paper and still give back to the communities.
As many readers of The Gazette know, we’re always looking for stories, and with the neighborhood papers, we work with freelance people IN those communities. These wonderful people write the stories for their area, help connect the area to the Gazette, and sometimes even provide home delivery to subscribers. While Augusta and Vaughn are the first papers we’re starting, we hope to get more communities interested in joining and have plans to bring out many more neighborhood papers shortly.
If you’re interested in finding out how to be a small town/neighborhood coordinator, call us at (406) 604-8929.
Author: Andy Anderson
Andy is publisher of Foxys Publishing Co, as well as pressman, ad sales, distribution and sometime janitor. He occasionally makes a wild attempt at writing but quite often is seen running around our offices trying to "Get 39 million things done today..."
