How to Start a Community Magazine
In order for a town of any size to maintain its vitality, accomplish shared goals and take pride in its unique characteristics, it's important that its residents not only know what's going on at any given time but also be able to communicate their concerns in an open forum. A good way to accomplish this is through a community magazine that focuses on local issues. Here's what you need to know to start one.
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Instructions
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Survey the interest level of business owners, teachers, clergy, community leaders and even your own neighbors to see if they'd like to have a community-based publication. You'll also want to research how your proposed magazine will complement or conflict with existing periodicals such as newsletters and weekly newspapers.
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Define your target audience. For instance, content that is targeted to families with young children is going to be far different from that which would appeal to local singles or to upscale two-person households with a lot of discretionary income.
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Identify how your new magazine will be distributed. You may want to print hard copies of material and mail them to subscriber households, or you may want to consider launching your community magazine as an ezine. In addition to significant cost savings, other advantages of an ezine are that you can use as much color as you want, have fewer restrictions in word count for articles, can make corrections even after the issue has been disseminated and can have your content accessible 24/7.
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Determine the frequency of publication. If you are producing a hard-copy magazine, you will probably want to distribute your magazine once a month or once every two months because of printing and mailing costs. Even if you decide to make your publication available electronically, you still need to assess how much new material you'll be generating so that your issues will be a uniform length.
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Decide whether your community magazine will be available for free or if a paid subscription will be required. Again, this gets back to how much startup capital you have to get things off the ground. Both hard-copy magazines and ezines are sustained through advertising fees. In order to attract advertisers to your publication, you need offer a direct benefit to them in the number of households you intend to reach and the number of potential clients they can attract as a result.
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Decide whether new issues will be automatically emailed to your subscribers or whether subscribers can access the magazine website via password whenever they want. If you're producing a hard-copy publication, you'll need to decide whether copies will be mailed out via the Post Office, delivered in person, and/or made available in magazine racks or on counters at coffeehouses, bookstores and libraries.
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Get a business license and register your magazine's official name with the Secretary of State's Office. If you have never set up a small business before, you'll want to spend a lot of time with the Small Business Administration (see Resources), whose website walks you through everything you need to know about licenses, Federal tax ID numbers and even getting startup loans and grants. If money is going to be exchanged in this enterprise (i.e., subscriptions and advertising fees), you will also need to open a separate business checking account.
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Set up a professional website for your magazine that will be easy for your readers to navigate. In addition to features, articles, restaurant reviews and interviews, you should also include a monthly calendar of upcoming events, a "Letters to the Editor" section and a listing of your submission requirements for new writers who want to contribute stories, press releases or photographs.
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Identify key personalities in your community who would like to contribute regular columns. Good examples of these contributors would include elected officials, educators, book and movie reviewers and wannabe advice columnists (including writers who enjoy penning humor).
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Plan for special editions such as a holiday shopping/entertaining issue, a summer camp overview or a bridal edition. As your magazine starts to grow, this will make it easier to court advertisers because they won't want to be left out of an issue they know their competitors are going to be in.
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Tips & Warnings
A wonderful incentive to attract paying subscribers is to either let them try the first month for free or offer a 50 percent subscription discount for the first six months.
Many entrepreneurs make the mistake of starting their publications with warm and fuzzy "puff" pieces and then switching over to the sort of hard news found in daily newspapers. This is problematic from two fronts. First, anything that is reported as hard news in a monthly publication is going to be old news by the time it actually gets distributed. Second, if subscribers were attracted to the publication because it had such an optimistic focus on schools, churches and local business people, they're going to get confused if you suddenly start commenting on national elections, conflicts overseas or anything else that doesn't have a direct and immediate bearing on their own town.
Resources
- Photo Credit Photo by Christina Hamlett
