Some changes in the wind

By LOU ANTONELLI

Managing Editor

After 40 years under one owner, the sale of The Times is bound to is bound to bring some changes. We plan to implement a lot of new ideas and projects that I am sure you will love.

In the meantime, in light of the fact the historical records indicates the first issue of The Clarksville Times was published on Jan. 18, 1873, we will be having a luncheon and open house next Thursday.

It will be buffet style, featuring a couple of roaster pans of my world famous lasagna. Serving starts at noon and will continue until the lasagna is gone. I would suggest you get there early, my lasagna tends to disappear rapidly.

We have an excellent rapport with the public, and you know you can always drop in the office any time, but I thought we should do something special to mark the changing of the guard.

We will also have door prizes – gift certificates for Clarksville Times subscriptions. We will be drawing for four, at 1, 2, 3 and 4 p.m.

I plan to start up a web site within a week. We had a web site when I started working here in 2015, but it was dropped as a cost-savings measure by the previous owners, who had to pay to have it maintained.

I have some experience with blogs, as a result of my fiction writing, and I know how to organize a basic web site through a free service, so I will be doing that shortly. Having a web site isn’t of much value to local folks, who get the paper directly, but it’s very useful for people who live out of town, and people doing on-line searches in general.

For those people who only get their worldview on-line, we have an active Facebook page, but it’s more useful for directing people to the real paper. Facebook is useful for basic messages and promotion, but as an actual source of news it’s horrible. It’s an echo chamber for negative gossip and hateful rumor-mongering.

I’d like to include an advertising salesperson to the staff, but I think it’s too early to add a salaried position. However, many newspaper ad salespeople work on commission. You need to offer a healthy commission if that’s how the person is to be paid, but I plan to do that, and pay commissions promptly. If you are interested, call us.

As part of the cheese paring that’s done by outfits strapped for cash – such as Red River County, which is closed on Fridays entirely - our offices have closed at noon on Fridays for a number of years. However, I think we need to be as accommodating as possible to our customers, so from now on we are open until 5 p.m. on Friday.

Many newspapers do annual Readers Choice Awards, where readers can nominate and vote for businesses in various categories, such as Best Tex-Mex Restaurant, best Gas Station, Best Convenience Store, etc. I think that’s a good way to get more exposure and attention for local businesses, and so I will probably be implementing that in the near future.

I also plan to start doing regular feature stories about local businesses, as another way to boost and bolster public support for our local economy.

The one thing I think you will not greet with universal acclaim is that we are probably having to go up on our subscription rates a few bucks. If you buy the paper every week of the year on a newsstand, its $39. Our subscription rates are a lot lower than that; for senior citizens it’s only $24 inside Red River County.

We have a lot – probably a majority – of subscribers who are senior citizens, and that $24 is a bit too low right now, especially in light of cost increases to us over the past few years. Since taking over we’ve been looking over figures, and that number probably needs to come up a little.

The good thing is, if there is any change, it won’t be for a while, so that’s an incentive to renew your subscription promptly. If you want to renew it at the current rate, even if it isn’t due yet, that’s fine.

I worked at a paper once where they announced a subscription rate hike but said anyone who came in before it kicked in could renew at the current rate. A number of people paid up for multiple years; I know one person did so for at least five!

If we decide to change the subscription rate, I will give y’all plenty of notice.

In closing, mentioning advertising commissions remind me of something that happened in Southwest Dallas County 25 years ago.

I was the editor of a weekly newspaper that was part of a chain of seven weeklies. A new publisher came in who was bossy and high-powered.

She wanted to show the corporation that owned the chain that she knew how to make a profit, and how to keep employees in check.

Ad people were paid straight commission of 25 percent. There was a Beall’s department store in the city, which spent more than $100,000 a year in advertising, which meant the ad sales person made $25,000 a year in commission from that account.

Bossy Boss came up with plan to increase profit for the corporation. She told the ad sales person, “You didn’t sell that account. That was a corporate decision by Beall’s, they were planning to spend that money any way. You don’t get any commission.”

The sales persons proved her quite wrong, after quitting and then getting Beall’s to transfer its advertising to another nearby weekly newspaper, which was locally owned and operated.

A few months later, the same Bossy Boss fired me. Guess where I went to work next?

That other newspaper was struggling financially, but having a $100,000 advertising account dropped in its lap because of bad business management proved to be a godsend.

The newspaper chain that lose the account? Doesn’t matter, they’re long gone. The second newspaper, though, is still in business.

The moral? It pays to treat your employees fairly, and to have local control and ownership of your newspaper.