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This is a special holiday issue of the Kingsbury Journal. There have been many ‘firsts’ for our fledgling community news team this year, and we thought we would take the opportunity to share some of them with you as we head into the holidays with family and friends.
The Kingsbury Journal was formed as a merger of The De Smet News and the Lake Preston Times after they suspended publication at the onset of the pandemic on April 1 this year. After living without a local newspaper for a few weeks, many people realized they missed having one — and a group banded together to secure the papers for our communities and figure out a way to keep them going.
When the first edition came out in May, we reported that twenty volunteers helped make it happen. At this point seven months later, we’ve had nearly forty volunteers step up to help with the paper in one way or another. With the support of subscribers and advertisers we have now been able to bring on some staff to help with the workload.
“The diversity of the team is one of the most unique aspects of the Kingsbury Journal,” said Tim Aughenbaugh, one of the volunteers. “Not only do the abilities and knowledge of each individual help with all the tasks that need to be done, but they each have a wide range of interests and personal connections. That results in ‘something for everybody’ in the paper.”
Many people are surprised to hear that due to precautions around the virus, the volunteers have never met as a team in person to put together the Kingsbury Journal. Some people who have worked together for months have only met in person for the first time in the last week or so. Some have never met in person. There are positives and negatives to working this way, but it is the only way the team knows at this time.
The pandemic played a key part in the events leading to the formation of the Kingsbury Journal and has dominated our pages and coverage ever since. ‘COVID’ — a word none of us had ever heard before — is the most common topic every week. On average, COVID has been mentioned in ten articles per issue. We long for the day it no longer graces these pages.
We still operate in an economic environment that makes it challenging to produce a newspaper, but believe our model will continue to work until things get back to something resembling normal.
Here are some other numbers from the last seven months.
Since our inaugural issue on May 20, 2020, the Kingsbury Journal team has published 31 weekly issues each Wednesday at 10 a.m.
The most common size of the newspaper has been 28 pages. Our largest issue was an election preview edition with 36 pages (this holiday issue matches that high mark). Our smallest papers have been 20 pages, which has happened twice.
An average of 25,000 words are written, copy edited, proofread, and paginated in each issue. For comparison, a novel is often 50,000 words.
Our state-of-the-art digital news site, kingsburyjournal.com, now hosts over 1,600 articles of content and over 1,500 photos. It is visited by more than 1,000 people each week.
Most of us on the team knew nothing about how a news business operated when we volunteered to help with this project. If you're curious, here is a brief rundown of what goes into publishing the Kingsbury Journal each week.
Down at the Kingsbury Journal office, located in the old De Smet News office building, the phones ring and the computers ping every day with questions, news information, ad requests and more. Sheryl Downes has recently taken the role of office manager and can be found putting legal notices together, updating subscriptions, and making sure the bills get paid.
When not at her computer writing and organizing content, Donna Palmlund is seen at meetings, on Zoom calls, attending ball games and school programs, or just around our towns taking pictures and interviewing people for a wide range of stories.
Marina Garcia, our advertising guru, contacts businesses about promotions and helps get their message in front of readers.
The writing team meets online every Monday at 7 p.m. to talk about how the current issue is coming together and to look at the upcoming week. This is where we kick around article ideas and organize people to write stories and take pictures. Anyone on the team is welcome and encouraged to attend.
The copy-editing team hops on the online system throughout the week and reads the stories that are “in review.” Once they are finished polishing the content, the articles get pushed over to “finished content” and are ready for the paper.
Tuesdays are spent putting the paper together, or in news-speak, paginating. This is akin to creating and assembling a giant jigsaw puzzle, and is where the paper you know takes its shape and form. Finished content is laid out and organized according to the Kingsbury Journal’s design standards. Lynn Rognsvoog with Creative Circle Media has been helping us with this process remotely since the start, and she now has Billi Aughenbaugh handling pagination from front to back.
On Tuesday night, after the paper is paginated, it is posted to our online system, where the volunteer proofreading team begins to pore over it late into the night and early Wednesday morning before going to work. The process usually leads to 100 to 200 corrections and suggestions for improvement in each edition.
Wednesday mornings start early, and are spent making corrections and finalizing the paper before sending it electronically to Leader Printing in Madison at 10 a.m. Sixteen hundred copies of the new edition then roll off the color presses and are sorted, bagged and addressed for mailing by 11:30 a.m.
As soon as the paper is sent to be printed, a volunteer starts driving down to Madison, usually arriving about the time the press run is finished. The distribution volunteer then loads the bundles of fresh papers in a pickup and drops them off at the post offices and eight retail locations in Arlington, Lake Preston, De Smet and Iroquois.
While the physical paper is getting distributed, other volunteers are working to upload content and post the e-Edition of the paper to kingsburyjournal.com for digital subscribers.
By 3:30 p.m. the weekly work is done and readers start receiving their Kingsbury Journal. Then the process immediately starts all over again.
From the beginning, our first goal as a community newspaper team was to deliver a good product. From there we hoped it would be supported by readers and advertisers. We want to thank all of you for providing that support, and will continue to try to provide a valuable service to you. We have learned a lot as a team, and we have a lot left to learn — there are several 'firsts' yet to come.
One of our team members has compared the ‘KJ’ to a good food recipe. It takes good ingredients (stories from our communities and lives, something for everybody), some good cooking instructions (a good process, system and training) and some willing cooks to bake it together with some love and attention.
We hope you are enjoying the Kingsbury Journal and welcome any feedback or suggestions to make it better. We're always looking to add new members to our team, so please give us a call with your interest to help at (605) 854-3331 or send an email to editor@kingsburyjournal.com.
