SPRING GREEN, WISCONSIN | WNA BEST IN DIVISION E (2022)
August 22, 2024
Dearest Gentle Reader—
We wanted to give some updates and share our print schedule for the rest of the year:
Upcoming Valley Sentinel Print Schedule
August 22: Publish
September 5: No publication due to the holiday/upcoming project
September 19: No publication due to upcoming project
October 3: Publish (Tentative: Spooky Season/Fall special section)
October 17: Publish
October 31: Publish
November 14: Publish (Annual Gun Deer Hunting edition)
November 28: No publication due to the holiday
December 12: Publish (Local Holiday Gift Guide special section/Blaze Orange Board special section)
December 26: No publication due to the holiday January 9, 2025: Publish (Tentative: Winter Wonderland special edition)
We first want to address what this schedule means for our current offerings:
Community Calendar: Our community calendar is the only comprehensive, curated community calendar in the area and we want to continue to build it and need your support to ensure we have all of the community’s events. For September, we cannot promise to maintain the calendar as usual as we will be workshopping calendar changes, including potentially an online calendar. Please continue to send us your events and check our website for updates. For the Nov. 14 and Dec. 12 editions, the calendar will be extended in print to cover the events of the next four weeks. So we’ll need any events for that timeframe ahead of those publication dates.
Articles/Columns/Editorials: Provided everyone isn’t sick of Arena Village Board meeting stories yet, we will continue to cover important stories to our greater community throughout September at a more relaxed pace, roughly publishing them online centered around the Sept. 5 and 19 dates. We will also post them on social media. We may republish them in our Oct. 3 edition or provide a digest of them and a link to our website. Regardless, we want to make sure journalism continues and everyone that wishes to read our stories have the accessibility to do so.
Advertising: This is a busy election time and not an ideal time to not publish. We will be offering online and social media advertising that will be print equivalent to our advertisers at equal or greater value. We may have a print pickup rate near 95%, but we still have an average of over 5,000 readers additionally engage with us between social media and our website every month. If your business had planned on doing a quarter page in print in September, we’ll be sure to put it online to reach our readers at an equal or greater value to you. We literally have the best advertising rates around, generally for print: $400 — full page, $200 — half page, $100 — quarter page, $50 — eighth page, with nonprofit rates half that for community/nonpolitical nonprofits. The closest comparable rate in the area would cost nearly double at almost $750 for a full page. We want to remain accessible not only for our readers, but also for our local small business community. With more opt-in eyes on our free publication than anywhere else, area businesses know the value of Valley Sentinel.
Now we want to address moving forward:
We’re making use of the Labor Day holiday and beyond to use September as a project month. Running an independent newspaper often feels like running from one fire to the next and our administrative tasks (and invoicing) and more have been suffering as we navigate this with an all-volunteer staff, and we don’t want our journalism to suffer as well. We want to ensure endeavors like the Lexington & Jefferson Literary Journal have their best possible chance to succeed. We want to make sure we’re in the best place to not only provide the best and most accessible community journalism, but also to be in a position to workshop and study to help find the best model for the sustainable future of strong independent community journalism, while ensuring journalism students and early-career journalists have a chance to get experience and explore in a newsroom and an area that reflects what a majority of our communities and news landscapes look like. We hope to take this project month to set the stage that will enable us to provide that service to our community and to journalism — to solve the local news problem together with you. We will also be taking the time to bolster our current offerings while finding new ways to connect with you. Don’t expect any huge changes before the end of the year and we may gradually roll things out over time. What we’re offering currently will not change and our print edition — as our main focus and premier product — is here to stay.
We will continue this fall and beyond to offer internships to area students, as well as apprenticeships to area early-career journalists. If you know any students interested in any aspect of journalism or the related business, from marketing to social media to podcasts and TikTok and beyond, please encourage them to reach out. As always, we strive to be a space for community contributors as well. We are truly what the community makes us and we want to be your community paper. If there’s something you think we should be doing or offering the community, lets discuss how we can make it happen. Let’s make that idea you’ve had a reality.
We don’t belong to a large news group or a hedge fund, we don’t have corporate or billionaire donors — it’s just us, our community support and a dream to do journalism better and dream bigger about what journalism can do to build our community and report on the things that matter most to you. We’re taking this time to tackle administrative tasks, build out our offerings over time and take the first steps towards a larger initiative to bolster and support the future and depth of community journalism we should all believe in. We need partners and support to make that happen.
How can you support us?
By continuing to read and by continuing to be understanding of our growing pains. By subscribing, by gifting subscriptions and by considering ongoing contributions towards making community journalism possible and accessible for all. By offering your expertise in areas where you believe you can help. By offering your photos, art and words as community contributors. By reaching out about areas you have interest in and want to consider covering and writing stories about. No formal experience? We have the ability to guide and teach and can offer access to community journalism lessons and guides. Are you an area business or marketing manager? We ask that you dream big with us! Continue to advertise so we can reach the community together, but also brainstorm and think about what we can do to build community together. We want to partner with area businesses and organizations to offer events, forums, initiatives and so much more. We have so many ideas for the future and want to hear yours too! Bring us your ideas and let’s use the power of the newspaper to build community and make those ideas a reality.
Your support means everything to us, we wouldn’t be able to do this without you! Thank you.
NICOLE AIMONE | EDITOR-IN-CHIEF TAYLOR SCOTT | MANAGING EDITOR OWNERS & PUBLISHERS
Valley Sentinel
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Valley Sentinel PO Box 144
Spring Green, WI 53588
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Valley Sentinel PO Box 144 Spring Green, WI 53588