Dear Readers,
You may have noticed the bright yellow coin boxes popping up around town at the end of last week. I hope they have caught your attention and I hope you will embrace the next step for The Trussville Tribune.
Since its inception, The Trussville Tribune print edition and the online edition at www.TrussvilleTribune.com have been provided free of charge. Over the next few weeks, we will transition to coin boxes and inside-store sales for the printed edition each week. The charge for each weekly issue will be 50 cents.
In order to grow as a community newspaper for Trussville, Clay, Pinson and surrounding areas, this is a necessary step forward. We have seen printing cost rise by 15 percent since May 2012 and as we grow the newspaper there are other normal costs associated with the production that must be addressed for The Trussville Tribune to remain as a community fixture.
Our staff takes great pleasure in providing a professional, well-written newspaper for our readers each week. To borrow a phrase from our friend and colleague Mark Kelly of Weld, we believe our staff provides “content worth paying for.” I hope you will agree.
I know there will be some who won’t be happy about paying for their copy of The Trussville Tribune. I completely understand and our news content will still be free of charge online for the foreseeable future. At the same time, writers don’t write for free, printers don’t print for free and distributors don’t distribute for free. I’m sure you can see where I’m going here. There are real costs in providing a printed paper each week and this is our way of helping meet that financial demand.
One of the most consistent problems we have faced has been reader complaints of stands running out of newspapers so quickly. The Trussville Tribune is distributed each Wednesday evening and all stands are stocked by Thursday morning.
Despite more than doubling the number of issues printed each week, by Friday afternoon, it can be very difficult to find a remaining copy of the newspaper. We hope that by charging a nominal amount for the newspaper, we will be able to increase the number of issues printed.
Our readers have embraced and taken ownership in The Trussville Tribune and for that we are grateful. I hope for your continued support as we seek to continue to grow with the communities that we represent.
Sincerely,
Scott Buttram, Publisher