“The newspaper business is great—if you can keep the money out of it.”
Troy Lyle, graduate of UK journalism and NoC sports editor
Author's Note: These updates on the paper will be delivered periodically for anyone needing the push or knowledge to start up their own micro-community ventures. For those not interested, this will all come off as pretentious bullshit. If you fall into the uninterested camp, I suggest moving on to a different article.
In May of 2009, North of Center appeared in Lexington, KY, for the first time. I knew we were onto something good when I teared up while reading a draft of Beth Connors Manke's feature piece on affordable housing in Lexington. That first issue, which included Beth's piece and came in at eight pages of text and 1,000 copies, cost me a little less than $270 to produce.
The first place that I asked for permission to leave the paper at, a business on North Limestone Street, told me no. Luckily the second and third places, Alfalfa's and Sunrise Bakery, said, “Why yes of course.” Were it not for their enthusiasm and kindness, the paper might not have lasted more than a couple issues. I am easily discouraged and a poor salesman to boot.
North of Center began operation in May 2009 without a business plan, without any advertisers or other source of self-generating income, and without any hired help. It had no distributors until a couple issues ago when Don Pratt, having come across it at some point, emailed and asked out of the blue to give them away. The paper's first paid advertisement didn't come until issue 3—a $25 ad from Evenstone Landscaping—from a friend who just wanted to help see the paper work out. Our main ad guy, Jerry Moody, has no phone and is currently homeless. The paper's writers work for free around their own full and weird schedules. It was not until issue 8 that our layout person, Keith, was able to get to bed before 5:00 AM on Monday night/Tuesday morning. Even now, we habitually run to 3:00 and 4:00 AM on layout nights, sandwiching our learning of the newspaper business around our full-time day jobs. Only last week did I finally get an office in our house out of which to work.
I started North of Center for a number of reasons, but chief among them were (1) a curiosity to see if I could do it and (2) a desire to create a community-minded reading text and writing outlet for students taking my first-year writing classes at Bluegrass Community and Technical College.
As a sort of working bonus, in the summers I teach an extra class of first-year writing. As a community college teacher, the class is a blessing. After a year juggling five classes a semester, the one summer course allows me to treat the course like a seminar...and it gives me extra summertime cash to supplement my salary. Last year, I bought a canoe with some of that cash. This summer, I used the summer teaching money to pay for the first six issues of North of Center—enough to cover most all of the summer.
As it turns out, I bought one king-hell of a summer adventure: newspaper drops to the poet Eric Sutherland at the public library and to Krem the grocer at Wine+Market; early-morning chats about “the newspaper life” over coffee and donuts and cold pizza with Troy and Keith; interviewing Seedleaf and Urban Gleaning leaders about the construction of community food networks; getting my own sports beat; meeting up at Al's Bar on nights the paper came out for a group looksie over beer, jokes, and food; meeting the artist John Lackey and the author Ed McClanahan; learning about my community from the viewpoint of someone obligated to write about it.
Typical male that I am, I have a one-track mind that is ill-suited to the kind of multi-tasking long-range business planning skills I should have as editor in chief of this filthy local rag. When we started last summer, that one-track focused on seeing if the collection of every-issue writers who really make North of Center work—Beth, Keith, Troy, Michael Benton, Colleen Glenn, Nick Kidd, Andrew Battista, myself—could actually commit to putting out a biweekly paper, on schedule, with no pay at all.
Having answered that question in the affirmative, this past fall I've wanted to ensure that these same writers, when most of them went back to their everyday jobs teaching college students how to read and write, didn't go certifiably insane attempting to make biweekly deadlines for long 2000 word articles or dropping off caches of papers to places like the Lexington Art League or CD Central.
In short, this first fiscal year has been less about evaluating our fiscal viability than it has been about ensuring that the paper's most important asset, its human capital, could function well. I wanted to know, did our hobby have legs to stand on?
The way I see it, in a venture like this, there's little sense in worrying about money when you don't know if the project is worth saving to begin with, and no project can work without invested, committed human capital. We have been fortunate in that the paper lucked into a group of varied, thoughtful, committed, and above all damn good writers who hold somewhat similar notions of putting their talents on display out there in the public, for the public.
So purely in terms of human capital, the state of NoC is good. On the docket for next fiscal year, we'll have interns and potential collaborations with some university classes. People have begun to ask about things they want to see covered, which means, hopefully, that the paper should continue to move in the future toward different avenues of focus, staffed by other people like our film and culture and sports and features editors who are interested in putting forth the energy to channel their voice and to actively assist others to effectively channel theirs. People are even starting to write letters to the editor (though we'd encourage more). Our human capital, for the moment at least, seems to be moving toward stable footing.
But now we have to answer the economic question: are we economically resilient. That question thus far remains unresolved. As a paper, we have a commitment to offering our writing and insights to the community as a freely given, freely taken community good. But at some point, we have to pay the bills; at some point, I'll feel an obligation to pay our writers at least a pittance for their contributions.
But still, things are not all bad here north of the center. Though we still lose money on virtually every issue we put out, we've steadily lost less money with each issue—a record Bernanke and Summers and Geithner would be proud of. We've got some advertisers (who you should support within your own personal means) that seem like they'll be steady streams of revenue, and we're always optimistic about prospects for a couple more. At the moment, we've built up enough dough in our business account to pay for about the next six issues or so.
A six-issue horizon. It's almost as if we're right back where we started, which if I can recall at this late hour in the evening, was a wonderful and exciting place to be.
To give all of us some much-needed time off to recharge and reflect on what worked and what didn't, what we can build on and what might be best cast off, North of Center will go on vacation for the rest of December; we'll start back in mid January. Here on the Chimp, we'll continue posting our older articles.
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