From: Danny Mayer, editor
While this paper is not an inordinately expensive venture, it does require some money to publish the papers that we distribute on the street—all told between 8 and 10 thousand dollars a year. Like other papers, we rely on advertising money to exist; unlike other papers, the entirety of our work is donated labor.
It was my hope that, nearly a year into publication, local advertisers would be bursting down the doors to take advantage of our cheap rates. Needless to say, that hasn’t happened, most likely for reasons of my own making. I can do many things at least passing well, but sales is not one of them, not even of a venture I’m intimately connected to and believe in.
I do, however, write pretty good, and we’re starting to get a hang of this newspaper business. So let me briefly make my case here to faithful readers and interested advertisers for supporting this paper. I’ll begin with advertisers.
To future advertisers
We may already be supporting, calling attention to, and writing about many of your valued customers—present or future. Our paper covers local urban-centered events and larger regional locales and issues. Our writers cover film and music concerns here in Lexington; they write on bike culture and urban gardening initiatives; they promote canoeing, kayaking, hunting and other nearby outdoor concerns. As a paper, we celebrate ground-up local sports like bike polo, roller derby, and disc golf, and we feature local graphic artists whose comic strips and illustrations enliven our pages.
Though our outward appearances sometimes suggest otherwise, we are a professional bunch. Now approaching the end of our first full year of publication, we have yet to miss a publication date, only taking off for an announced 3 week vacation over December. We aim to keep our ad rates low enough so that local businesses with little advertising budgets may still have their name and services circulated through old world local media. What’s more, we aim to keep our pages as ad-free as possible. As a potential advertiser, this means greater visibility for your advertisement.
If you are interested, please see the ad rates we have not-so-subtly splashed on the back page of this issue—in color, no less. You can contact me, Danny, at noceditors@yahoo.com
Note: We do not sell ads to realtors. We are a paper that attempts to cover the north-side, which means that, like it or not, we are already an agent in the area’s gentrification. In part to lessen our role in that process, we do not want to provide a space for the buying and selling of downtown homes whose increased property values will ratchet-up the pressure on long-term neighbors to leave.
To Current Readers
If you value this paper but do not own a business, you are still welcome—encouraged—to contribute to helping make this free paper run. Here are a couple things you can do.
(1) Contribute to the paper’s content or distribution. Write for us; draw for us; drop off papers for us. We hope to model community engagement by doing. It is the highest compliment to know that others who read us are similarly inspired to act and do and contribute.
(2) Visit our advertisers, and let them know that you’ve seen their ad in our paper. (See the 20% discount coupon from the Friends of the Library on the Arts/Film page? Use it so that they have reason to continue supporting us.)
(3) Just give us money. We’ll take cash or checks, from pennies and confederate dollars on up to million dollar bills and Microsoft stock options. We’ll call it something cool like community sustained journalism, and at some point give you a title so you can feel part of a club, like being a Little Lebowski Urban Achiever.
But seriously, we need the money to operate. You can make checks out to North of Center and send them to:
North of Center
430 N. MLK
Lexington, KY 40508
Although it doesn’t seem like it at the moment, we are in fact a business, not a non-profit. We’re NOT tax deductible.
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