Community meetings
Meetings were held in Lake Preston on Thursday, April 23 and in De Smet on Friday, April 24 to introduce each community to the plan for bringing back our newspapers. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the on-site attendance was limited to provide for social distancing. The Lake Preston meeting was shared on Facebook, and the De Smet meeting was also broadcast as a virtual Zoom meeting. The response was very positive in both meetings with several people immediately stepping up to get involved with the volunteer concept. This is what makes our small rural communities great - we come together to do what needs to be done to keep our communities vibrant now and in the future.
The next step for our initial team is to setup the collaboration tools needed to keep our volunteers in the loop on what needs to be done and how things are progressing. Part of that solution is this website. Other pieces of the solution will be coming soon. Please sign-up to help via email and keep your ear to the ground for updates we'll be posting/publishing everywhere we can in the near future.
Kingsbury Journal
That's right. That's the name of our new paper, Kingsbury Journal. We plan to publish the first edition on Wednesday May 20th. We have a great group of volunteers learning so many new things so fast and the support from the communities of Lake Preston, De Smet, and beyond has been fantastic. We did some private and public (Facebook) polling to gauge support for switching from the two newspapers to a single newspaper. The single paper model was supported by a total of 313 (90%) of the 348 votes cast across the Lake Preston and De Smet Facebook pages. While the history and tradition of the Lake Preston Times and The De Smet News is valuable, we appreciate our communities' willingness to move forward with what we expect will be a more viable and efficient publishing model. It is also likely to provide a number of benefits to readers with more content and advertisers with a larger circulation. Those who had active subscriptions when the papers shut down on April 1st can expect to see the first edition in their mailboxes on Thursday May 21st, according to current plans. We'll be sharing more in the future about how those not previously subscribed can purchase memberships to our new paper.
