Notes from Perry Street: Changes, Changes, Changes

By JOHN A. WINTERS, Publisher

I feel like I should start this column with a “good morning” or “good afternoon” or something. It’s June 9th as I write this. In a few hours, we are, as they say in our world, “going to press.”

And with that said, it’s probably a good time to address the elephant in the room. If you are reading this and think to yourself that something seems different, you are not going crazy.

Welcome to the new version of The Paper. This is the third and by far most notable change, And our other publication, The Coweta Shopper, is getting the same makeover. More on that in a minute.

Since starting The Paper more than 10 years ago, the publication always had a more rectangular look, taller than it was wide. Now, it’s pretty much square. So what brought on the change?

Economic uncertainty seems to be the buzzword these days and amply applies in this case.The printing company that, well, printed and delivered our newspapers, jacked up our rates by more than 35 percent.

I guess you could say they just didn’t want our business any more and despite trying to work something out, we couldn’t. And so we went with a new printer.

Newspaper presses come in all shapes and sizes and most important, configurations. The press company we are now with has a more traditional setup – thus the more square look of The Paper. It’s basically a sheet of newsprint folded in half.

I want to thank our team of Joey Howard and Ruth Doyal, who have spent the last two weeks completely changing everything we do. Each ad had to be resized. And I mean every single ad, whether we built it or it came directly from our clients.

They did an amazing job.

We have one other big change coming up, because if you are going to change, might as well do it all at once.

The Coweta Shopper has been around since 1989. Up until now, it was a zoned publication that went to a different part of the county each week. We had three small Shoppers that went out the second, third and fourth weeks. All that is changing.

The Coweta Shopper will now be a “super” Shopper – we are combining the three publications into one larger one.

The Paper will continue to go out the first week of the month. The bigger Shopper will go out the third week of the month. About half of each will be mailed, with the rest distributed to more than 125 locations throughout the county and surrounding areas. Both publications will start with 10,000 circulation.

There are a couple of advantages with this new schedule. We can cover the entire county every other week rather than taking a month. We can also increase circulation much more cost effectively. The biggest expense with printing is getting the press set up. Once it is running, the cost starts to drop significantly as we are only paying for ink and newsprint.

Change is inevitable. We were not ready for this drastic of a change, but our team has pulled it together. Our commitment to our readers and advertisers has not change – just the look.

And so, welcome to the new Paper and Coweta Shoppers.

Until next time.