This week’s issue of the News Review has two special things in store for its readers.
First, approximately 60 fond folks celebrated their love for family, friends and Greenbelt in rhyme and schmaltz in our Valentine’s Love Notes (pages 8, 9 and 16). Tastefully decorated with hearts, flowers, cupids and so on by our artistic layout team of Anne Gardner and Christine Doran, Valentine’s Coordinator Jan Wolf brings us a vibrant spread of sentiment, love and joy.
But There’s More
We’ve taken the opportunity of the colorful Valentines to introduce our new paper stock. The News Review was the happy winner of a $30K ARPA grant from the City of Greenbelt for business infrastructure initiatives. Approximately half that sum will be devoted to purchasing a better class of paper to print on for several months. The new stock provides more contrast, especially important for photographs and graphics (like advertising). It is also less porous – meaning that ink hitting the paper doesn’t spread around so much but preserves the crisp edges of the original photograph and prints truer to the original colors. The rationale is that the more attractive presentation will increase readership and advertising.
Heightened Appeal
We’re hoping, of course, to encourage more readers and more advertisers to pick up on what we offer and to increase the efficiency of the newspaper in helping residents with their daily lives in our community. We’d like more advertisers to know how effective advertising in our special little newspaper is.
Website Upgrade
The remainder of the grant is to be devoted to an update to our website, which has been relatively unchanged for several years. It will still be a relatively simple offering (we are, after all, a mostly print newspaper) but, in addition to making it easier to maintain, we expect to add the ability to size, price, submit and pay for classified and display ads online.
We hope our readers find both these initiatives to their taste and we remind all who read it that a local newspaper is an increasingly rare and precious resource already lost to many communities. We encourage you to join us in helping to produce each week’s beautiful issue, filled with news of our beautiful city.
To find out more about volunteer opportunities, email Editor@GreenbeltNewsReview.com.