Newspaper Disruptor – Changing the newspaper game one day at a time

Stop fighting about the economy. Get mad at those who made it this way.

May 16, 2020 JoeyYoung Comments 1 comment

We were lucky. We got Payroll Protection Plan (PPP) money in the first round, largely due to working with a great local banker who went out of his way with us and with several businesses in the area to ensure they were taken care of. The PPP was a half-assed, thrown-together, quick Band-Aid for American businesses, created by the government, that everyone from the Small Business Administration to local bankers to those it was supposed to help could see was…

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The death of local news

April 3, 2020 JoeyYoung Comments 2 comments

This was recently featured in Editor & Publisher. Read this, and then you will understand my rant. Giving away your product, unless your product is mass distribution printed newspaper, is a death sentence for local news. How someone with this message is still considered an expert is beyond me. Giving away content, acting as if what we do doesn’t have value, and relying on advertising alone is exactly what got this industry in trouble in the first place. That along…

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Ain’t No Joke – E&P features me in 25 Under 35 Section

April 1, 2020 JoeyYoung Comments 0 Comment

To borrow from my “cuz” Chris Young, “This Ain’t No Joke.” As with his and Melody Spurney’s first “Ain’t No Joke Food Truck Rally” in Newton on April 1, yet another life moment has happened for me on this date. Six years ago, April 1, 2014, it was publically announced that I had secured majority ownership of Kansas Publishing Ventures from Joel Klaassen and merged our tiny weekly paper with his publishing company in Hillsboro. Today, April 1, 2020, I…

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Shutting down isn’t easy for most small businesses

March 23, 2020 JoeyYoung Comments 2 comments

When you are living through a global pandemic that requires people to socially distance themselves from others, you have a lot of time to scroll on social media. It’s an amazing time suck. A lot of folks are suddenly infectious disease experts and doctors all of the sudden, too. I had no idea how many successful people I was friends with. Regardless, the overwhelming refrain on social media is to just shut down the world for two weeks or longer…

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Small market zilch gets attention of E&P

February 12, 2020 JoeyYoung Comments 0 Comment

I write this blog primarily to scream into nothingness about the newspaper industry with the assumption that only a few folks I am friends with might take a look and care. It’s therapeutic and something that has kept me from pulling my hair out. Throughout the years, I have become friends with lots of people in the industry, many of whom surely think I am full of hot air and are probably right. Occasionally, you find some like-minded folks, get…

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Why Buffett selling his papers doesn’t bother me

January 30, 2020 JoeyYoung Comments 1 comment

I like to think I am well read. When Lindsey and I started this journey of newspaper ownership over seven years ago, we didn’t do it blind. We read “The E-Myth” by Michael E. Gerber and “Brewing Up a Business: Adventures in Beer from the Founder of Dogfish Head Craft Brewery” by Sam Calagione before we ever signed the dotted line for our first paper, The Clarion. Since then, I have read anything I can get my hands on about…

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Internet is best friend, worst enemy of news

March 9, 2018 JoeyYoung Comments 0 Comment

This is a new era in our shared history. Simply put, the Internet is the best and worst thing that has ever been invented in human history. Feel like that is hyperbole? It’s not. The most powerful thing in the world is sitting in the palm of your hand, and it can be manipulated to overthrow governments, kill someone’s character, and track the movements of everything and everyone. Not all of that is bad, either. There has been no era…

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Two years of Newton Now

August 7, 2017 JoeyYoung Comments 1 comment

There wasn’t one person, outside of Joel Klaassen (founding publisher of The Hillsboro Free Press) that thought we would succeed long-term with Newton Now. We got a lot of support early. I love these people more than you can know. They wanted us to succeed, but I could see it in many eyes as we told them our plan to launch a competitive weekly newspaper in a market that had a 5-day corporate newspaper. They were going to support us….

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You can’t “Own Local” from 1,000 miles away

July 11, 2017 JoeyYoung Comments 0 Comment

I often wonder why I torture myself. It’s almost like I want to get angry when I see the link in my inbox, see it is another story about how Gannett or Gatehouse is screwing up journalism for the rest of us, and instead of hitting the trash button, I dive right in and get pissed off all over again. This week it was an interview with Alain Begun, VP of Marketing at Gatehouse Media, on a podcast hosted by…

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