by Cathie Meetre
In the November 26 issue, we looked back at a successful if turbulent year of operation. In the next year we have plans to up our game even more. We expect to maintain and improve our appeal to advertisers and to get more people to pick up the paper and open it to the wealth of information and insight within. We’re improving our internal systems to make it easier to produce the paper, easier to track advertising and less time-consuming to do business functions like billing and communications. We are judiciously increasing our use of computer technology.
Our new website debuted – but that’s just the start of what we hope will be a dynamic web presence that complements but does not replace the print paper. Over the year we hope that the degree to which Greenbelters interact electronically with the paper will increase and that the online services we offer will grow. We seek volunteers to help post new material on the website.
Another initiative is an increase in our interactions with areas outside the original city. Connecting with the population of Greenbelt’s East and West is more difficult for us to do. It’s partly a question of demographics. While the original city has an older population with a large percentage of retirees looking for meaningful volunteer activities, the surrounding population is more transient, younger, more diverse and less likely to pick up and read the paper or volunteer for it. This population has less history with the city and less identification with it. The percentage of owner-occupied dwellings is, however, increasing with the occupation of Greenbelt Station and we’d like to identify in each community a cadre of volunteers who keep us informed of the ongoing issues and happenings or who’d like to contribute overall to the paper. We are also aware of our growing Spanish-speaking population and their needs. Watch this space for initiatives over the year to come.
Challenges
There are many challenges going forward. Although the paper is currently operating in the black, partly due to recent cost-saving initiatives and partly because of an overall upswing in advertising, it is really the services of our volunteers that make that possible. The paper pays for some services and provides small patronage dividends to its volunteers based on their work, but our overall costs for labor are much lower than a paper relying exclusively on paid labor.
To keep the paper operating ‘profitably,’ we must continuously seek out, train and nurture our volunteer workforce. Operating with volunteers has its special flavor. A job that in the real world would take one person 20 hours may be spread among five volunteers with different strengths and styles.
Each needs to know what the other did – so instead of one person with continuity, five individuals run a relay race. Some run fast, some slowly. Some hop and some meander. Sometimes the baton goes AWOL.
The editor may need to communicate with 30 staff whereas if we were a paid operation, she might have to communicate with five. On the other hand, this depth means that the fabric of the paper is stretchy and enduring because of what NASA would call multiple redundancy – where there’s always someone equipped to step in during absences or crises. If the News Review were marooned on Mars, it would grow vegetables and produce a newspaper.
Old Friends and New
Last June we celebrated the more than six decades of leadership by Elaine Skolnik as she turned 90. She had been called the brains of the newspaper, served as president and guided the news reporting. In March we lost a long-time friend, neighbor and colleague on the paper, Tom White. Tom had provided strong leadership and managerial insight into a paper that was all about the city he had loved and served for decades. The year also saw the retirement of Assistant Editor Barbara Likowski to Emeritus status. Barbara contributed many decades of faithful and critical service to the paper.
A newspaper is nothing without its editor. Greenbelt Outstanding Citizen Mary Lou Williamson has been editor for over four decades and in many ways personifies the paper. Always calm and often tactful, she has the ability to get unlikely people to cooperate and to extract a yes from people who were determined to say no. Under her leadership the paper has weathered no few storms and thrived in an era when others have crumbled.
Delivering News
Without solid reporting, a paper is as a sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal. Regular city-beat reporters Kathleen Gallagher and Jim Giese bring rare expertise in council matters and are supported by Sue Krofchik on Police Blotter, Kathleen McFarland with Our Neighbors, Mary Moien, Amanda Brozana, Anne Gardner, Diane Oberg and others.
Unsung Heroes
Without fanfare, some staff toil in the background to do the essential if unglamorous work that drives the operation. In addition to our production and advertising teams, mentioned last week, we have a team that processes incoming material for publication. Like carrion crows, they pick through the incoming email to find nourishment – stories, letters, press releases that concern Greenbelt, family announcements – separate them from the herd, follow up to get all the components and get text, captions and photos ready for editorial attention. Lola Skolnik, Pat Scully and Nancy Tolzman tend to email while Judy Bordeaux, Alison Rose, Angie Evans, Peggy Higgins and Leslie Kash help make the corrections, type handwritten submissions and update edited stories. Staffer Bernie Gormally puts the paper to bed every Tuesday night – sometimes well after midnight.
Circulation
Papers need to get out promptly into the hands of the people it serves. The News Review works throughout the communities and with merchants to distribute the paper. In the core of Greenbelt the tradition of youngsters delivering the paper continues and each is paid a token amount weekly with the opportunity (coming to you soon as an envelope) to receive generous tips from the customers at the holiday season. Routes are often handed down to siblings or friends and some papers are delivered by multiple generations. Outside the core, papers are delivered to homes, offices and stores throughout the city and through homeowners’ associations for distribution. Ian Tuckman is our circulation manager, as he has been for many years. He picks up the papers from the printer’s delivery van at the Co-op ramp on Thursday mornings in tied bundles of 50 and distributes them to carriers and businesses. We’re currently working on making our deliveries more predictable and to prevent concerns about soggy or blown about papers. A new volunteer, Ray Zammuto, whose expertise is in organizational systems, is analyzing how we can improve our services in this area. Expect more news on this topic over the next few months.
Other initiatives
If this list of initiatives isn’t long enough, the back burner contains more. We would like to attend to our archive and improve the quality and search ability of the scanned documents we have online as well as considering the best way to preserve the paper copies – which, at nearly 80 years old for the earliest – are in danger of crumbling. We’d like to make our business systems link better to our customer-facing processes so that advertising and story submission is less manual and easier for our staff, our patrons and our advertisers.