Want to start your own newspaper in a city like Milwaukee, but don’t know how to even begin? Well, in that case, I think that this short article will be able to help you. I’ve been in more or less the same situation as you did when I first wanted to start my own paper and had to deal with a lot of obstacles on that path, but eventually, I managed to overcome them all and now my paper, “Milwaukee Bleacher” is read by around 70, 000 people every day. Now, I know that this doesn’t seem like a whole lot for a town with a population of a little more then 2 million according to the latest census, but I am really proud of what has been accomplished here and you also have to consider the fact that it is a focused newspaper, writing only about sports. I’ll explain more about why that is important a bit later.
The first thing you need to do when starting a newspaper in Milwaukee is to decide what direction will your paper go in. If you try to run a general newspaper in a town the size of Milwaukee, you will have a tough competition in the local subscription paper companies. This was the first mistake that I made, but fortunately, I quickly changed that and found a great niche in the thing that most men love. Sports. So, instead of writing a little bit about everything and trying in vain to compete against much bigger newspapers in Milwaukee, I decided to focus on one thing. Of course, when it comes to writing about sports in Milwaukee, there are a lot of stories to be covered, from the latest in Milwaukee Bucks, top stories of the week about NFL’s Milwaukee Badgers or college sports in this town.
The next thing you need to do is to decide how frequent will your paper be published and how big will your distribution be. We all want our paper to be read by millions of people and to go out every day, but that often just isn’t possible, nor is it recommended. You need to know how big the town is in the first place. If a town has a little over 2 million inhabitants, like Milwaukee, then it doesn’t make sense to publish a paper that have an edition of 3 million. This means that, in the best possible scenario, 1 million will go to waste. In general, if you are going for an all-round newspaper, without any specific niche, then a ratio of 1:5 will work out just fine for you, but if you want to focus a bit more, then that ratio needs to be bigger.
Of course, there are a lot more things that you need to know about starting a newspaper in a town like Milwaukee, but I think that this will give you a good start. The most important thing, however, is to be patient with it. There will be good days and bad days for your newspapers.