998. This week, I talked with Samantha and Greg Enslen, who recently purchased their hometown newspaper, the "Tippecanoe Gazette" in Tipp City, Ohio. Sam and Greg shared how they are making it work, from updating antiquated systems to expanding news coverage and readership. We also discussed balancing print and digital content, the challenges of ad sales and subscriptions, their commitment to hyper-local reporting, their thoughts on AI in journalism, and the colorful stories that make small-town news so much fun. Whether you're an aspiring journalist or are simply curious about the future of local news, you'll be inspired by the Enslens' dedication to keeping community journalism alive.
998. This week, I talked with Samantha and Greg Enslen, who recently purchased their hometown newspaper, the "Tippecanoe Gazette" in Tipp City, Ohio. Sam and Greg shared how they are making it work, from updating antiquated systems to expanding news coverage and readership. We also discussed balancing print and digital content, the challenges of ad sales and subscriptions, their commitment to hyper-local reporting, their thoughts on AI in journalism, and the colorful stories that make small-town news so much fun. Whether you're an aspiring journalist or are simply curious about the future of local news, you'll be inspired by the Enslens' dedication to keeping community journalism alive.
Visit the "Tippecanoe Gazette" online: https://www.tippgazette.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TippecanoeGazette
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tippcitygazette/
| Edited transcript with links: https://grammar-girl.simplecast.com/episodes/enslen/transcript
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MIGNON: Grammar Girl here.
I'm Mignon Fogarty, and today we're going to talk about something that many writers dream of but almost nobody gets to do. And that's buying your hometown newspaper.
Today, I'm here with Samantha Enslen and her husband Greg Enslen.
And you'll recognize Samantha's name because she's a very frequent contributor to the Grammar Girl podcast.
And when she told me they had bought their hometown newspaper, I just knew I had to have them on to talk about it.
And I put questions out on social media, and I got more questions about this topic than anything I've ever posted. So people are really interested in this.
Samantha and Greg, welcome to the Grammar Girl podcast.
SAMANTHA: Awesome. Thank you so much for inviting us.
GREG: Good to see you.
MIGNON: Yeah, you bet.
And it's great for just people to see you, Samantha, anyway, just since you're such a frequent contributor. But so my understanding is that this was primarily Greg's thing. So please tell me just how this came about. How did you come to buy your hometown newspaper?
GREG: Well, actually, I have been wanting to buy it for a long time. So it was something I've been trying to make happen for several years. And I used to write for the paper, have written for the paper for off and on for the last 15 years.
And every time it would come up for sale, I would try to sneak in the situation and make a bid. And I never was successful before this last time. But this last time I got a call from the editor, and she said, it looks like we're shutting down the paper unless we can find a local buyer who's interested in buying it.
And I said, “Oh boy, hang on a second, let me talk to my wife about that.” So then we had many conversations about it before we pulled the trigger.
MIGNON: I bet.
SAMANTHA: Now, to be fair, in past times when Greg was interested, I was like, "Are you insane? No, we do not need another thing to keep track of.” But, you know, over time I was like, okay, this actually is something that's really important to him. And so, yeah, like Greg said, we're like, all right, let's figure out how to make this happen.
MIGNON: Amazing. Right, because you have a whole other business. I mean, you have Dragonfly Editorial.
GREG: We have several other businesses, actually. Dragonfly is the big one, but I'm also a writer, and I've written 34 books. And that's a big part of my time is trying to find time to write fiction and nonfiction. And then I'm also on our local city council, which is a large time sink. And Sam and I have some Airbnbs. So we're quite busy.
But this last opportunity when it came up, I talked to her, and I said, “I have a theory about newspapers, local newspapers, and Facebook. And I think a lot of people think local newspapers are a dying breed. And I actually think they're making a comeback. That's my supposition.”
So we're going to see if it works out. I'm not sure.
MIGNON: That's great.
Okay, I want people to ask questions about that. And I will say people did ask, "Are they crazy?" And I wasn't going to bring that up.
GREG: No, please do, yes.
MIGNON: So first, can you give me, paint a picture for me of what the newspaper is, what it … where it is, what it's like, how big it is, what the building is like, how many people work there and stuff like that.
GREG: Well, I would say it's a modern business because we don't have any employees. And we don't have any infrastructure, and we don't have an office, and we don't have … we have a post office box. And I have about 15 people that work for me, but we're all freelancers. And that's how we've structured the business.
So there's no overhead, which is great. That makes it a lot easier to make fast decisions, change.
SAMANTHA: No fixed overhead. Trust me, there's overhead.
GREG: There's some overhead, but not like a brick and mortar business, not like an old school newspaper with the print presses and all that kind of stuff.
But yeah, one of the things that I think is going to be helpful moving forward is that we are a group of freelancers, and I can bring people on, we can let people go if they don't work out, and I can keep my rates low on trying to get as much content into the papers I can in a fiscally responsible fashion.
MIGNON: Was it always structured that way or did you restructure it to be that way?
GREG: It’s gotten less successful over time as a local newspaper would. But we're located north of Dayton. We're in Tipp City, and that's our local paper. It's been in business for about 15 years. There are several other towns around here that their papers have closed.
So we have tried, the paper has tried over time to expand some of their coverage and it's a shame to see a town lose its newspaper, especially a small town.
MIGNON: Right, and that's Tipp City, Ohio, right?
GREG: Yes, Tipp City, Ohio, we're north of Dayton, and it's difficult for local people to get the word out about things, not even businesses, but like, you know, PTA and things like that.
It's hard for them — the city council — to get the word out about events and things that are happening if there's no local paper.
MIGNON: Yeah. And when one of the people asked, you know, how you differentiate yourself from the competition, and I was wondering is there even competition? What do you consider your competition?
GREG: Unfortunately, 10 years ago, this paper, there were four papers in this business, and those all three have closed. So this is the remaining existing paper.
And like I said, there are several small towns around here that are actually larger than Tipp that don't have a paper. So there isn't actually any competition for us, except for the Dayton Daily News.
And then we have a larger town north of us called Troy, Ohio, and they have a twice weekly paper. So those are our competition, but I try not to look at it like that.
I feel like my competition is Facebook and Nextdoor. Those are the two things I'm trying to scoop. If I can get information to people before that, or get it out to more people than Facebook's algorithm can, then I'm doing my job.
MIGNON: Yeah. And is it just online or do you have print as well?
GREG: We were exclusively print, and it's a weekly. Goes out on Wednesdays.
And then when I bought the paper, one of the first things we did was add a website, but it is important to me that the news be free. So that anything that's on the website is free. We don't have a paywall or anything like that. I cannot stand those things. I feel like they just discourage people from learning what they need to know. So we don't have a paywall, but we don't put every story up online. It's about 10 to 15 stories a week, and it's a selection of what's in the print paper.
But if you want to know what's going on, you really do need to buy the print paper. And that's kind of how we're moving forward right now.
MIGNON: That was a common question… is sort of, what is your business model? Is it advertising? Is it subscriptions? How does that break down revenue wise?
You know, what, what are you doing to make this work, especially given that so many of the others have gone out of business?
SAMANTHA: Can I address that? Let's back up a little, Mignon. One of the things that Greg is doing, which he will probably be too shy to talk about, is a truly Herculean effort of dragging the paper into the 21st century or whatever century we're in right now.
Literally, when he bought the paper, the subscription system for the newspaper that ran the paper was on a laptop.
MIGNON: The whole thing?
SAMANTHA: The whole thing.
A single laptop. Using a subscription tool, software, that was no longer supported. That didn't exist anymore.
GREG: The company went under.
SAMANTHA: I found to my horror that we didn't even have email addresses for most of the customers. I was like, "How can you not even have email addresses?"
We found that because the subscription system was so antiquated, subscription notifications hadn't been going out. So it has truly, like Greg said, there wasn't a website. There was a little to no posting on Facebook or social media.
So he's been going through, again, he'll be too demure to say this himself.
GREG: Too modest, I think is a better way.
SAMANTHA: Modest. Okay. Thank you.
GREG: Demure. I wouldn't say demure.
MIGNON: The demure journalist.
SAMANTHA: He has been going through an incredible and incredibly accelerated entrepreneurial journey since last September, which is what that's just nine months of like I said, dragging every single element of the operations of this into the modern era, starting with literally the two of us sitting down with the laptop, the famous laptop that had all the subscription information.
And Greg identified a cloud-based subscription service, normal, and we literally sat down for hours and hours in his office. And I read him the people's names who were subscribers and their address and the last check number for when they had sent in a subscription. And like all of that, a little bit of it, we could port over from the old system, but we had to literally enter all the subscribers by hand into a new system.
And you had very few writers at the paper, you're just like inventing writers out of the air or recruiting writers out of the air to start writing for the paper.
I mean it's, I don't know if I'm answering the exact question even that you asked before, but I do not want to underestimate how absolutely huge of a venture this has been that he's undertaken.
MIGNON: Did you know when you bought it that it was that bad?
GREG: When I started the process.
MIGNON: Samantha’s shaking her head silently. No.
GREG: What do they call it? Due diligence?
When I started looking into it and trying to decide if I wanted to buy it, the list of things that were needing updates kept getting longer and longer.
And the one that really concerned me was the subscriptions because it was something that I thought that was the basis of the paper. We weren't getting a lot of advertising in the paper. So it was mostly a subscription-based setup.
And if we were only having a third, two-thirds, half of the people that were actually getting the paper were paying for it, then that's obviously problematic.
So thanks to Sam, we went through the whole system and the laptop survived. And we were able to get everything off of the laptop and into the cloud system before there were any issues.
And then we moved on from there. And now we have a robust, modern system. I can tell you exactly how many subscribers we have every day. And that's, I can see it when people subscribe online and pay. And yes, it's much more robust now. And it's not based on one laptop. That’s scary.
MIGNON: Was it even backed up?
GREG: No, there was no way to back it up. The software was actually from a company that went under in 2011, I think it was. So there was no support.
And there was no way to even, I couldn't download a copy of the program and install it on another machine and port the information over because you couldn't get the software.
It was exciting. It was very exciting.
MIGNON: Oh, so the hard drive had failed you would have lost everything.
GREG: We would have had to start from scratch, but I don't know how you would even do that because we wouldn't have anybody's addresses. I don't know how we would have done it, but it worked out well.
MIGNON: You'd have been standing on the street corner with signs like if you were subscribed.
SAMANTHA: And so, you know, in answer to your question, did we have surprises in terms of when Greg bought the paper?
The subscriber situation was definitely a surprise because, you know, we thought we had this many subscribers. Well, we had this many names, but come to find there were only like this many paying current subscribers.
So it's been a matter of, like, hopefully retaining those people, getting the people back who previously had been subscribers, but who hadn't even paid in quite a while and then now trying to add more people.
So like Greg said, you can literally see every day, you know, so at first we thought we were going to be here. We went way down. Now it's like, “Oh, a little bit more, a little bit more, a little bit more.”
MIGNON: That's great. So it's going up.
SAM: It is going up.
GREG: Yeah. One of the things we've tried to do is my mantra for the editor and our writers is to be hyperlocal.
So I want to know, I literally want to know the score of the Little League team that just played at the park yesterday. Like, and when people ask me why, I'm saying what can you not find on Facebook and what can you not find in the date and daily news. And that's my focus: hyperlocal, because that's what people want.
And this is how newspapers started. Everybody can find out what's going on in the world, but you're paying somebody to go out and collect all that information and put it in a convenient paper and buy it.
So you're buying the information that someone has gone out and collected for you. You could do it yourself, and that's what Facebook tried to do for a while. But the way the algorithms constantly change.
I have best friends that they post things on their Facebook page, and I don't see it. So you can't guarantee you're going to find things out.
MIGNON: That was a common question too, is sort of what is your content philosophy? You know, do you get the AP stories? How do you balance sort of the…
GREG: Nope
MIGNON: So no to the AP? That makes sense. Like what you're saying about, you can get your national news anywhere.
So you're doing, you know, the schools and the events and what about like what are your content goals?
Do you also want to, you know, hold the local government accountable or improve the reputation of the local community or like, sort of what are your big picture goals?
GREG: Well, we started out trying to cover as much hard news as possible. And that's kind of what the paper focused on before I bought it.
And I've tried to move it more into like the, we call it homework and recess. And it's more, what are the fun things that are happening around town that you don't know about unless you have a friend who's on the tree board or if you have a friend who's in the arts council, that kind of thing.
And of course, we're still covering hard news, and we're covering courts and people that get convicted of things or in fires and police reports and things like that. But I've really tried to lean more on the positive things that people want, because a lot of news that's online is if it leads, it bleeds, you know, that whole saying. And it's not necessarily positive.
I'm not trying to, like, paint our local area and some kind of artificially positive light. I'm just trying to surface the things that are happening that are local that are good and bad. And we tend to lean more towards the positive news.
MIGNON: And you said earlier that it didn't have a lot of ads. Are you ramping up your ad sales to supplement that part of your revenue? Or is this all subscribers?
SAMANTHA: Yeah. So that's what's been interesting. So when this whole venture started off, I was like, “Greg, have fun with that. Sayonara, good luck.”
And then I just got more and more interested by what he was doing and wound up, you know, it's still 100% his venture, but I have wound up being involved in little bits and pieces more and more. One of the things that I did to help out was to write a year in review article. So in doing so, I looked at literally every issue from last year to, which would be 2023. And did summaries of the key stories.
And I talked to Greg afterwards, and I was like, “Greg, there are almost no ads in this paper.” Like, again, I didn't think it was that bad. So we have been very fortunate to, we put an ad in the paper for an ad sales person.
GREG: That's how you do it.
SAMANTHA: And we found an ad sales person. And she has been fantastic so far.
She's the kind of personality that she doesn't mind walking in the door of a local business and just being like, "Hi, I'm Jody from the Tippecanoe Gazette, and I'd like to talk to you about ad sales in the paper.”
GREG: And I'm horrible at that kind of stuff.
So when I bought the paper, one of the first things I talked to my editor, Carla, she's in charge of the content. And I said, “I don't really want to be in charge of the content. You're still going to stay in that. And that's your job. And I want to expand and grow. But one of the first things we need to do is get somebody on ad sales.” And that's helped a lot with the financial bottom line.
And then another hard decision we made in February is we actually doubled the price of the paper. It went from $1 to $2. So that's very exciting numbers here. But there was some pushback on that. And we lost some subscribers for that, because of that. But what I've tried to do is make it worth their money and worth their time. So we've grown the paper consistently. We were about 10 pages when I bought it. And now we're almost always 16 or 18.
And I'm hoping that people are getting more, twice as much value. And that's how I like to say it.
SAMANTHA: Yeah, I was out having drinks last night and somebody in town, we live in a very small town, let us be clear. I was out having drinks last night and somebody came up to me and was like, “Wow, the paper is getting so big. It's really exciting.”
So, you know, it is, people do notice that stuff. It is that local, that community focused.
GREG: Yeah, and when I do get complaints they say, “Why did you double the price of the paper?” And I said, “Well, I've taken that money and we've hired six new writers.
And that's kind of my angle is, make the paper as good as possible and cover our local news as best we can. And then we have recently started to expand into other towns right around us and add specific content writers that can gather information from these other small towns that don't have their own newspaper. So we've expanded into West Milton, which is west of here. It's a little town.
And then there's another town called New Carlyle, which is east of here. Neither of them have papers. So we're trying to grow those operations.
And it's literally a news gathering operation because I'm trying to find people that live there to give me news because I can't write news for other towns because it doesn't feel authentic.
MIGNON: I was wondering that when you said that the papers in all the nearby towns had closed, I was wondering if you were planning to expand.
And this reminded me of a person, Halee Kotara wrote a message when I put out a call for questions and said, they grew up in a town of 500 people and still subscribe to their hometown newspaper and said, adorably, it's shared with another little town, and it's folded differently. So whichever town you're from is on top. It was so cute.
And actually, they said, if you want, they will send you a copy of that newspaper.
GREG: I would love that. That would be great.
MIGNON: OK, I'll make a note of that and put you in touch!
So, Hailey wanted to know how you balance the need to find stories with not getting up in everyone's business.
And she said that our newspaper editor struggles with people being hesitant to even chat with her casually or socially lest they end up in the paper.
So saying you were out for drinks and people were commenting on the paper, like, do you ever run into that now?
GREG: I have had a little bit of pushback on that.
We, actually, one of the things I started early on in the paper was a new column called the Social Page. And I was trying to replicate what you see on Facebook and have people send in information about their weddings and parties and anniversaries and kind of like take it back to the old school society page, but without that nasty hierarchies and all that business.
And that didn't go well. People weren't interested in sending in information on that. So I would have to go out and find stuff and then after a while we’d phase that out because it just doesn't seem like people really want to share that kind of information anymore. And if they do, it's on Facebook with eight or nine people and it's not something that's public anymore. I don't know.
MIGNON: Yeah. And at the very beginning, you said you have a theory about news and Facebook. Do you want to talk about that more?
GREG: Yeah, I feel like Facebook came in and essentially killed the news business, in my opinion, when it was very popular in the early tens.
I think 2010 through 2015, we saw a lot of news getting moved from local newspapers onto the web and onto, not onto the websites of those local newspapers, but the actual news was being taken and co-opted and just being shared on Facebook. And people were sharing information locally with their friends and local people on Facebook and the algorithm at the time served up all that information to you as it should. And a lot of newspapers just could not keep up with that.
And I think that's when a lot of papers closed and over the last 10, 15 years, I think we've seen a kind of a culling of all of the papers, and the papers that do survive have cut way back.
The Dayton Daily used to be a weekly, a daily, and now they've stopped doing a Saturday paper, that kind of thing. And the paper in Troy, Ohio, used to be a daily, and now it's twice a week.
And they're cutting costs, and they're trying to save money, and they're trying to stay alive. And that makes perfect sense.
My theory when I talked Sam into doing this whole thing was that I think Facebook has moved on. And I don't think they're interested in sharing local news with local people. I think it's more about ad sales and more about hitting big numbers.
And if I put something on my Facebook page about an event that I'm holding, I cannot be certain that my friends are going to know about it. And I find that kind of sad. And the other thing that Facebook has done is grown to the point where I just don't think they have a local focus anymore.
And that's kind of what Nextdoor has come in and done is tried to step in and take that back to the lower, neighborhood level. And Nextdoor is interesting too. People get on there and complain about lost pets and things like that. And that's used to be Facebook. And now Nextdoor is doing that. And I don't know what's going to come after Nextdoor.
It's kind of, I just think it's interesting how everything seems to keep evolving. And now when I see people on the street and they say, thank you for having a local paper, because I don't know how I would know about the paint classes that they're having at the local Y. Unless you're on the Y page on Facebook and you're monitoring it, you're never going to know that kind of thing.
And even if you do that, they may not see it. So I think it's gone all the way back around. And now a local newspaper is a viable option. We'll see.
MIGNON: It's almost like the original push notification, right? It comes to you.
SAMANTHA: Yeah. So in terms of the deliveries, right now it's all delivered by US mail. The paper goes out on Wednesdays. We used to have some mail carriers who still literally picked up the papers and delivered them door by door.
But when we had to transition to that cloud-based subscription system, there was not an easy way to segregate the mailing lists out to like, what was going to go to the post office? What was going to go to mail carriers?
So we just switched to doing everything by US mail.
MIGNON: And then what about social media?
SAMANTHA: There is still, I mean, I totally agree with Greg in terms of Facebook not really doing the greatest job anymore of delivering up local news and information about your friends anymore. But we do still think there's a place for that.
And one of the things that he has added in also, I was talking earlier about dragging everything of the paper into the 21st century, he’s added a social media person. So the paper goes out on Wednesdays on print, the print paper goes out. And then shortly after that, Greg puts up not all but selected stories to the website. And then from there, the social media person pushes them out on Facebook and Instagram.
GREG: And Twitter.
SAMANTHA: And Twitter also. And well, you can talk about that. And you've got a huge uptick already.
GREG: Yeah, since we started doing this consistently.
And again, I think that's the thing with social media is you just have to keep doing it and doing it regularly and doing it consistently.
She's been posting things three, four times a day, three or four stories a day, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. And then we don't have anything posted unless it's breaking news for the rest of the week.
But if you want to read the news, the print version goes out on Wednesday, and that's where it starts. And then we don't start posting stories from the paper until Thursday. And then none of them are really time sensitive. So we can kind of space them out that way and do that.
But we have a have had a lot of success with posting stories, especially about local, like eateries, like places people want to go eat, because we'll put something out, we put something up last two weeks ago, and it's got 400 comments and likes and something on that about a place that people like to eat.
And people have opinions about that kind of thing. And that's, now that's the place for social media. And that's the place for Facebook is that's the kind of thing. And that's where we've had a lot of uptick on feedback on that.
And it's interesting to watch the conversations about a story that we posted two weeks ago happening live. It's really interesting.
So I think that there's still a place for Twitter and Facebook. And then this new person I've hired, she knows how to do Reels and she knows how to do all that kind of stuff.
So she's been putting stuff on Instagram and trying to grow our numbers on all of those platforms.
MIGNON: Do you find that that's driving subscriptions at all?
GREG: I can't tell if I can connect the two of them. I would love to do that. I find that difficult to see a cause and effect that way. I feel like everybody who's subscribed is already subscribed because they're getting the paper, but then we're getting a lot of people from out of the area that are commenting on the stories. So that could drive that.
And one of the things that's interesting is we have a lot of subscribers that are not in the area, and the US Postal Service helps us out with that because you don't have to be here to get the paper.
MIGNON: Right. Like the follower, like probably people who used to live there and just want to keep up with it, right?
SAMANTHA: Exactly. Yes.
GREG: Yeah. I had a lady call me from Arizona a couple months ago and she said she had a subscription and she wanted to keep it because it was her last connection with Tipp City when she lives in Arizona, and she's very elderly, and she's in a home out there.
And she said that's one of her highlights of the week is reading about, like, the senior tea or the groundbreaking of the new water park or whatever. It makes her feel like she's still connected to the town. Even though she hasn't lived here, I think it was 40 years she'd moved away.
MIGNON: Wow. That's amazing. That's so cool.
And it reminds me of sort of the flip side.
Yeah, it's true. We know that readership for newspapers tends to be on the older side, and it reminds me of someone asked what your plans are to sort of make the newspaper appeal to a younger demographic. Do you have any specific plans to sort of grow the audience that way?
GREG: I don't. I would love some suggestions. I tell my editor all the time, “How can we get more readers under 80?”
And that's something, I'm making a joke because we have a lot of great readers and a lot of great demographics, and I'm making fun of the situation. But I honestly don't think anybody under 20 is getting their news from any place other than TikTok. And I don't think that's a good thing. I try to get younger people to read the paper by putting stories in that I think will be relevant to them. And that's, it's kind of like put it out there and see what happens.
I don't know if I personally can convince people to not get their news from YouTube, but I get news from YouTube also. So I can't really complain.
SAMANTHA: I will slightly disagree with what you said, Greg, only because two of his best writers are high school kids.
GREG: Yeah. That's true.
SAMANTHA: So I mean, and we get applications from people who are in high school, who are young college age people who want to write for the paper.
And so I think there is still somewhere out there, there is still an interest in that and an understanding of that as an art form. I don't know if you call it an art form, a communications vehicle.
And I think we're looking for more ways like that. Can we get the high school creative writing class involved in some way or the yearbook or things like that?
I do think there's opportunities there. But like I said, we are literally nine months in at this point, and Greg has done so much in that time period. And yeah, that's more to come.
MIGNON: Yeah, no, that's great.
GREG: What I've told my staff is that we're trying to get the paper to a financial spot where it looks like it's got a future, and it's not kind of limping along, and raising the cover price and drastically increasing the number of ads we're selling to a point. We're not going to, it's not going to be all ads. I can't stand papers like that. But we have to grow the ad inventory along with the stories and make sure that it looks like a good mix. But that's the key right now is to try to get the paper on a solid footing. And then yes, I think the next goal would be to try to figure out how to cover more demographics.
MIGNON: Yeah. Our mutual friend Dave Nelson, actually, that was one of his questions. Do you hope to turn a profit someday or would it just keeping it going as a going concern? Would that be a win?
SAMANTHA: Well, speaking for our family.
GREG: Yes, we do want to have a profit.
But I honestly think there's a place for locally run newspapers in small towns that are run by foundations and things like that, where it's a nonprofit group of people that get together, and they publish a paper.
And that's not, the focus isn't trying to make as much money as possible. The focus is trying to educate as many people as possible.
And I honestly do think over time, some of the old papers that went away will come back in more of a like a more of a nonprofit situation.
SAMANTHA: Yeah. Yeah. Mignon, I don't know if you're aware, there's a great organization called Press Forward. That is a foundation right now that is specifically trying to promote local news and local newspapers in areas that … you know, we have food deserts in cities. Well, now we also have news deserts, places where there's no local news coverage at all. So they actually just are ready to do their very first round of funding and have applications out right now for local, and it's for local news and it's for essentially any operating expenses that people need right now to keep going.
So we're going to apply for one of those. We don't know if we will get one. But yeah, I think Greg, you might be onto something that local news may become something that is more of a community driven or foundation driven, as well as the ad revenue and the subscription revenue. We shall see.
GREG: Yeah, I could certainly see a small town that isn't supported or covered by a larger paper from a local large town ... I could certainly see a small town's library standing, growing from a newsletter organization or operation and growing that up to some kind of printed thing.
I see that with local organizations like our Chamber of Commerce that they have a mailing list that goes out, and then they also have a printed version of that that they put out in local shops. I feel like there's a need for that kind of thing.
People like a printed media still is hanging on by its thumbnails. And it's one of those things that I think people are going back to at this point.
SAMANTHA: Well, I think the other issue that's relevant right now is that we're in this era all of a sudden of AI where there's always been fake news. Now there's really, really fake news.
GREG: Actual fake news.
SAMANTHA: And so what my belief and slash hope is is that as more of that becomes so much more prevalent and you're like, I don't know what's real anymore.
And it's distressing. I think it's very distressing to not know if things were created by a real person or not.
When you have a local print paper that was written by, the stories are written by people who live in your city, who are real people, who have their real pictures in the paper, I'm hoping that people will turn to that as a source of authenticity and as a source of reality and something that they can actually trust that's being created by their neighbors.
MIGNON: Yeah, I definitely think that could happen. That makes a lot of sense. There's not going to be so much questioning about what's true.
People did have questions about AI. They wanted to know if you're going to use AI in the production of the paper in any way. And then they also wanted to know if you had any way or any plan to sort of protect yourself from AI.
I know there was that story about a fake voicemail that implicated a high school, I think it was a high school principal who supposedly said something awful on voicemail but hadn't. It was AI generated.
So they sort of wanted to know if you're going to use AI and also if you're going to sort of protect your news source from AI somehow.
GREG: Well, at this point, absolutely not. And that's just an editorial decision that we're making on our end. Again, going back to the hyperlocal and the trusted sources. And we want people to read the story.
And when I see that person that read the story on the street the next day, I don't want them to call me out and say, "Hey, I could tell you that was AI written" or something. We want to be hyperlocal, and we want to make sure everything we have in the paper is authentic.
Another thing that we started doing when I bought the papers is that everything gets a solid proofread edit through the system before it goes into the paper just to bump up the quality levels.
And we have used AI visualization tools on a few things. We are working on a redesign of the logo of the paper, and I needed to send some ideas to the designer. So I used it for that just to kind of get some blue sky concepts of what I think the new logo could look like. But no, certainly going to have that designed by a human.
I think they, I like them better.
MIGNON: So to finish up, I have just a few fun questions.
So Steve Ryan from Facebook wanted to know if you've ever had the opportunity yet to yell, "Stop the presses!"
GREG: No, but I am telling you, this is the coolest thing ever. I drive up to pick up the paper every Tuesday morning. So it goes to press Monday night.
So we do have a group of production people that send the paper over the internet via high-res PDF to the print shop, which is located about 90 minutes from us.
So I drive up to the print shop, pick up the paper Tuesday mornings, bring it back, and we take it to the post office, and then it goes out Tuesday afternoon, and it's delivered on Wednesdays. That's the schedule.
But I find myself lingering at the print shop because this is a 1950s, '60s style, dirty, grimy print shop with these gigantic machines that are like 150 feet long, and they're printing the paper after mine.
Usually when I get there, the paper's printed, and they're inserting, hand inserting all of the inserts, the menards and the little things that go in the middle. There's a team of people that puts those in one at a time. It's great.
While they're doing that, I usually go hang out over by the print press and watch the guys printing the actual physical … it's so different from when you think about Facebook and AI and all this stuff. It feels like you're going back in time, and there's guys there that are checking the color of the papers to make sure they're coming off the print presses and that they look correct.
The last time I was up there, I saw a guy with this big, it looked like a giant Q-tip, and he had a bucket, and he was putting ink (ink!) on the thing. I'm like, “Oh my god, that is so cool.”
So every time I go up there, it's just fascinating to see that there's all these things now that aren't data center driven, and they're not algorithms. They're physical things that are being made by actual humans, and it's so fascinating to watch. I love it.
MIGNON: That's so cool.
When I was on my high school newspaper, a couple times went and got to pick up the paper, and it was the same thing.
You're facing these enormous presses, and it's just kind of awe-inspiring.
GREG: I have not yelled “Stop the presses” yet. So I will work on that. I will try to get that.
MIGNON: Get on that. That's got to be a life experience, like a bucket list thing.
Gina Mayfield had a great question: What are some of the most colorful stories that have been in the paper since you've been publishing? What are some of your favorite local stories that you loved to cover?
SAMANTHA: I can talk about that a little bit because that's one of the things where I have stepped in to help with is writing some fun feature stories.
So like Greg said, of course we cover what's going on in city council, what's going on in the school board, what's going on with the township trustees. There's a police blotter. So those are kind of like all the basics.
But then I also get to interview the hundred-year-old man who lives in Tipp City and learn all about his life.
Literally, one of the first stories I wrote was, you know, how those guys turn on the fire hydrants and let the water shoot out of the fire hydrants? I saw that happening. I'm like “errrrgh” pull my car over to the side of the road. I was like, "Hey, I'm with the paper. What are you guys doing? That looks so cool."
So they explained what they're doing and how it works.
We talked to, there was a big scandal in town because the old coffee shop closed, and there was supposed to be a new coffee shop, but then the new coffee shop backed out. So you know, is there going to be a coffee shop in Tipp City anymore? What's going to happen?
It's just really, really fun local, again like Greg said, super local stuff like that.
I just interviewed the person who, they used to run a mulch business, and then there was a giant fire at the mulch business, and it burned down. So now they're opening a new business.
Just like Greg said, it's not about fake positivity, but it's about, there is so much fun and cool and interesting stuff that's actually already going on.
So it's just taking the time to find those people and ask them about it, and talk to them about it, and learn all the fun stuff they're doing.
MIGNON: That's great. That's wonderful.
GREG: Yeah. So one of probably still the most popular feature in the paper is the police blotter. People love to read about what's happened locally, and we've expanded that and added the fire and EMS also. So we occasionally will get a good story about a fire or an EMS run.
We don't use any names, obviously, but we try to make sure we're covering everything that people are interested in.
And we actually, because of Sam and her jumping out of cars randomly and interviewing people, we had to, we started a new column called "What's That?" and it's essentially, it's whatever she's interested in talking about that week with photos.
So it's usually some kind of tree that's fallen down on something or it's, last week was the guys that drive the funny little trucks that go along the railroad tracks and check the railroad tracks for wear and damage.
That was fascinating. I loved that.
SAMANTHA: Yeah, literally looking around town and being like, “What's that?” And then taking a picture of it and finding out the answer.
Can I say my favorite police blotter story ever?
GREG: Oh. Be careful.
SAMANTHA: So our police blotter is hilarious because it's written by the police officers and like, and we really don't edit it. So it's just kind of like very matter of fact.
But there was a domestic dispute situation one time, and I guess there was a woman inside the house and a man outside the house, and she wanted him to leave, and the police had to come to intervene.
So it said this in the police blotter, he agreed to leave, but only if he could get his garlic press from the house. That was non-negotiable.
MIGNON: Priorities.
SAMANTHA: So the police helped him to retrieve his garlic press, and then he was able to leave the scene. So again, this is kind of the level of the scandal going on in Tipp City, Ohio.
GREG: Yesterday, I was at the coffee shop and somebody said, “Are you going to cover the story that happened in New Carlyle? Two donkeys got loose and were running down the road” and I said, “Please send that to me. Did anybody get pictures?” Because that sells papers. Sorry, it does, and it's hilarious.
And that's the kind of stuff AI is not going to come up with, I don't think.
MIGNON: That was my first thought, did they have pictures?
Well, thank you so much.
The last question is actually an important one. It's from Erin Moran who's a Grammarpaloozian, and Erin said, “Other than subscribing, what can regular folks do to support local and independent journalism?”
GREG: Well, from my perspective, it would be to subscribe because you really do support the people who are putting the paper together every day and that subscription money might feel like a waste, but it hires, I'm using that literally today to pay a writer that we just brought on two weeks ago to write about stuff that's happening with the school board in another town.
And I could not cover that story without that person, and people don't freelance for free. It's a weird word. People do not want to just donate their time and money forever.
They want to be able to get paid for their work, and I want to pay them for their work because they're doing good work.
So a subscription would be good if you're in a local town, and you still have a paper, and you want to keep that paper in business, I would run an ad. That's another huge thing.
If you've got a business, and you sell tires in your local town, and your paper closes, think about how you would get the word out about your spring sale on your tires.
It's almost impossible to do without a local paper, and the way to keep your local paper is to keep it in business, and to do that you have to support it.
It's just like any other local business. If you've got a restaurant you like, and they close, it's because enough people didn't go there, and it's pretty simple.
MIGNON: Yeah, and it just occurred to me if you already subscribe, well, be sure to tell the advertisers you saw their ads in the paper too so they know that they're there.
SAMANTHA: That's a great point.
Yes, if you go into a store because you saw an ad in the local paper, let the shop owner or the business know that you're there because of that ad. That's hugely valuable.
GREG: Yeah, it feels like you're doing something from the '30s, and it seems weird that I'm going to go to a store and buy something I could just get on Amazon.
But I do go to stores and buy things that I can get on Amazon because I like the idea of having a store I can go to. It's kind of the same mindset. If you like having a local paper, you have to support it.
MIGNON: Yeah. Well, I just can't tell you the amount of goodwill that I felt pouring out from all the commenters.
Everyone was so excited to hear you were doing this and wished you, even though they were maybe worried or wondering, they wished you so much goodwill and success. People really are excited about what you're doing and want you to succeed.
So, to wrap up, why don't you tell people where they can find you? They're listening and suddenly they want to subscribe even if maybe they're not in your town or where can people find you?
GREG: Absolutely.
If you want an example of a cute little small town newspaper to show to your friends, where the tippgazette.com, just go to tippgazette.com.
If you're in the Dayton area, and you want a paper, there is a nice list on the website of where it is for sale. We just added two new retailers today I'm very excited about, including one of our best doughnut shops is going to start carrying the paper.
I'm like, yes!
That's the best way to support it would be to follow us on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and then subscribe to the paper so you can see what it's like.
Take that paper, printed paper that you're going to get in the mail. It will actually physically come to your house. It's kind of weird. Take that paper around and see if you can get one started in your town because I really do think a local paper is, it's a backbone important thing. It's like a city council or a parks department or a school board. It's really something every small town needs, really.
MIGNON: That's Tipp Gazette with two p's, right?
GREG: Yes.
MIGNON: I'll put a link to that in the show notes and so people can find it if they want to look for it.
Sam and Greg, thank you so much.
SAMANTHA: Awesome. Thank you so much. It was great to talk to you.