Like all area businesses, we are monitoring this virus outbreak closely. We are taking steps to ensure the safety of our team, those in our communities in which our staff members come into contact with, along with trying to determine the best route for publishing our newspaper moving forward.
Though the name has changed throughout the years and several mergers have taken place, our newspaper coverage locally dates back to the 1870s. We have published through two world wars, the Great Depression, Korea, Vietnam, and numerous other slowdowns and terrorist attacks. With this stated, the virus outbreak and government State of Emergencies declared at the Federal, State and Local level are shutting down our fellow small businesses unlike anything we have seen before and unfortunately, it has already had a massive impact on our newspaper operation. This is certainly not a complaint as we all need to use ultimate caution and defeat the spreading of the virus.
As stated before in my columns, our profit margins for subscriptions and counter sales are very slim and in weeks where we published 40-70 pages in the past, we lost monies selling our newspaper. I addressed this concern just a few weeks ago when we raised newspaper prices to $2.00 allowing a thin margin of profit when newspapers are sold via subscriptions or purchases at local stores. Long story short, almost all our usable operation revenue comes from local businesses advertisement, this revenue allows us to send reporters and photographers to events, cover our sales team expenses, cover our design team costs, basic 101 office expenses, etc.
I will not bore you with the number of cuts we have received since the coronavirus outbreak from local businesses needing to cancel long term advertisement along with little to no new week to week advertisement being placed. Like so many other businesses and families in the area, there is a lot of uncertainty right now, especially financially and we are all making cuts and sacrifices.
With this stated, I plan on issuing updates on social media, email campaigns and within our publication to keep our readers up to date concerning our future operation game plan, we are taking things day by day. There are no changes planned concerning our publication in the next week but we will monitor conditions and give updates when we can.
How can you help? If you are a business or individual needing to place an advertisement, a classified, etc. please feel free to contact me at publisher@thevillagereporter.com as we have made some unbelievable deals on advertisement opportunities. If you are a reader that may just browse free news stories on our social media pages or maybe pick up an occasional newspaper at the store, please consider supporting us with a subscription purchase (visit www.thevillagereporter.com to purchase a subscription from our website).
In closing, we will not charge non-subscribers or try to hide important news coverage behind a paywall at www.thevillagereporter.com during this difficult time. We will continue to provide important notices for free and share them on social media now and in the future.
Please be safe, consider faith and squeeze your love on your loved ones more than ever before.
Forrest R. Church, Publisher
THE VILLAGE REPORTER