Well done.

Tom, you’ve hit on the nub of a big problem there for us. If people only think of a ‘newspaper’ as being a thing composed of news and ads then the economics are probably as you describe.

Our big task will be to remind/inspire people to realise that there are way more things you can do with newsprint and ink.

John cites a good example above, or, we had someone get in touch today who wants to produce a celebratory newspaper for their Dad’s 50th birthday. Community groups, clubs, societies, all those sorts of people might try and get a bit of advertising to offset some of their costs but for the most part, we assume, will be thinking of this as a cheap but elegant way of getting their content printed. They’re not going into the eyeballs business, they want to make a newspaper, and they’ll pay for it in whatever way makes sense to them. All the papers we’ve made so far have made economic sense to their makers, none of them have carried ads. (Except house ads for us.)

The newspaper/advertising market is in serious decline. We’re trying to sidestep that, we’re not getting involved.

Similarly, we’ll leave final delivery to them as well – a club might distribute to members at a meeting, a community group might find some volunteers to do door-to-door, a protest group might hand them out in the street. Newspapers we’ve done to date have been distributed in a variety of ways – handed out at pubs and festivals, distributed through corporate internal mail and sent in the post.

Hope that makes some sense. Your comment is much appreciated – clearly we need to explain ourselves better and set expectations properly.

John