The changes in the newspaper business in the past 30 years are staggering. Plus, great artist renderings of the Troy indoor football practice facility.
Aww. I feel that nostalgia when I run across my old business cards I had when I owned my own pharmacy. I think I’d just keel over in shock if someone found an old sign! I still have all the newspaper stories done on me and my little store. My local paper was good to me (and we did spend some serious money advertising in them as well). How nice to have that sign! Jealous!!!
What an incredible story to tell. Alabama is truly blessed to have you as one of its sons. thank you for all you do. You're a good man, bill rice and Lord knows.We could use more like you right now.
a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you And your family. May the good lord bless and keep you in the coming years.
As I just shared with you in an email, Richard's name came up in the Q&A after my talk to Exchange Club members. A few club members know Richard and know about the "embalmers clots." One lady was a fan of your website! I am not familiar with Via Frei. Can you send me a link via my email?
Formalise the running of your business (book keeping needs, online tools, legal issues, hints and tips) and then syndicate/franchise the operation with online or in person training events on how to run a small town online newspaper. Leverage your skill in the industry to bring in new blood. This way you could start to grow a larger pool of journalists that can keep their finger on more issues but distributed instead of centralised. Still keeping the reporters local but also have a link to the syndicated sites with a curated top story list that every editor thinks has a wider appeal or significance.
Then to enter the new century that we live in take a slice out of the biggest online revenue stream, advertising. Become an advertising syndicator. Take adverts from local companies (or whoever and add them tastefully as opt in adverts that curious people might want to view. Make the requirement for advertising copy to be attractive instead of demeaning, hateful, fearmongering and generally brainwashing. Your advertisers will then have a audience and you have interesting tit-bits to share. The local bookstore could run a sponsored crossword that can be printed or completed online. Run adverts AFTER the news, make them desert, demand advertisers reward potential customers instead of berating them, change the industry one small town at a time. Finally find a company that sells or leases affordable smart TVs that you can display your adverts on. Offer to place these inside local walk in shops, have them run adverts for the shop alternating with your news headlines and your syndicated adverts. Make it into a system that the big players cannot compete with because they want to use all you wall space or have crappy adverts, demand quality copy that people WANT to watch or read. Remember the subscription QR-code that people can scan to keep getting the full news stories.
I wish you great success and look forward to your association eclipsing the Murdoch empire. :-)
Wow. These are great suggestions. I love the concept of getting a syndicate of local Substack newspapers and then letting all members run the "greatest hits" or best stories from the combined group. And you could do something with advertising. I'm not real clear on how Substack treats advertising. I think a few Substackers ARE running some form of advertising.
You could put a scare into the mainstream corporate news organizations if enough real and local journalists pooled their resources and talents ... We might need to schedule a future Zoom call and brainstorm more on how to make something like this happen.
I think you would have to create the syndication platform outside SubStack which is not a free market. It can be used for the publishing of stories and subscriptions perhaps but not for the product that you want to create. You would have to have as much of the system open source as possible. The adverts get voted on and if they contain a falsehood they are immediately cancelled. Then based of family values, humor, ethics, morals, regenerative lifestyle, local ownership and tax responsibility and any other tags that people actually care about, points deducted for brainwashing techniques. The users would score an advert and the worse the score the higher the cost to show the advert. If the advert gets a 100% score you would charge very little, basically enough to cover costs of running the system, any adverts that abuse the customer must pay a high premium that makes PROFIT to compensate for the bad taste they leave. Advertiser is free to run AB testing (mandatory review costs for each variant) in sequence or concurrently and would hopefully strive to maximise score as this will be cheapest clicks and maximum customer satisfaction, the score would be visible with a radar chart that can be easily parsed by a glance. Bad adverts can be ignored and advertiser will go away.
Customers could then elect to view and rate adverts as required to gain extensions on their subscriptions. Advertisers would agree to pay for a set number of community critiques of any new advert they want to place and this money would be used to extend the subscription of the users.
The idea is to turn the paradigm on it's head. Make the journalists own the system and make the customers select the adverts and make the advertisers into the product and let them know up front instead of the hidden selling of customer details.
Oh, also no provision for any customer details to leak to the advertiser. No tracking links of any sort. They can check their click through by having a unique landing page for every campaign and people who click through from the adverts directly would leak the source page in the forwarder information (at that point they are no longer anonymous but they cannot be targeted because they are not visible until they click through.
So make advertising fun and profitable for the customer.
So with regard to the advertisers, make em pay. Social credit in reverse. Teach people what it is about and let the advertisers know that there is another way. Only noble companies and people would end up advertising and if all sales go to them then that would be a win. The various syndicated journalists/newspapers would obviously be able to run their adverts as well with similar terms and get compensated for views on their own platform.
The real issue here is that there is no way to publish anything for free, advertising is a evil that can be tamed if the user is in control.
A big project and above my pay grade but if done well and properly functioning it could work well, spread across the world and make you filthy rich. :-)
This is a BIG idea. As an "idea person" I love it and am intrigued. I've got so many projects I want to pursue, I don't know if I have time to pursue this one, but someone needs to. It's interesting that readers can be exposed to great ideas like this in the reader comments. IMO different models are needed for advertisers, subscribers/readers and "content providers.
Why not write an article one day after you have ruminated on the idea. Put out there your wish list of what you think might work and ask all your readers and any other writers to write about it.
I have mentioned my idea of user curated adverts perhaps 5-8 times in the last 5 years and you are the first to see value in it.
We cannot win the battle for world domination without revenue and the only ones who have it are the capitalists and the easiest way to grab a slice is from marketing, manufacturing and distribution are too capital intensive and monopolized with large barriers to entry..
We need to use the only tool we have, our attention span and our word of mouth and direct our purchasing power towards ethical advertising (which can be one of the main slogans to promote the internally complex system that has to be made easier to use than playing a mobile phone game, it could also incorporate a game vibe where you shoot down bad adverts and prop up the good ones, gaming the system has to be prevented by having invitation only access to the critique system and if someone is found to be a rotten apple everyone he invited and the person who invited him get pruned immediately and have to try re-enter somehow.
You could make not for profit resistance movement adverts run for free at say 10% of the bandwidth sort of as a tithe to get the word out but still curated for positive and truthful content by the customers.
A second feature I have proposed is to curate people. Anyone who has a Wikipedia page or is mentioned anywhere in politics, media , entertainment, WEF, YGL, masons Scientology, academia, healthcare or anywhere that people have leadership or manipulative powers. The people get voted on and if they lie on the record the lies are linked and recorded and they are scored, sort of like a social credit score for THEM instead of for US. This could be linked to a phone app and browser plug in that will put a red box around anything attributed to a bad person so that we can simply ignore it or block it out completely. Like a porn filter for propaganda, this could be sold to parents to provide to their children where political lies and porn are filtered out and kids do not get adverts for sugar and hormone treatment.
My coding skills ended with Pascal and C on PIC microcontrollers and this needs some god level database wizardry or I would try to do it myself.
There is also the Society of Problem Solvers (here on SubStack) who want to promote swarm intelligence that could tie in wit this where you have trust based groups that can discover solutions to complex problems.
Hi Bill and thank you. I am from a long line of small businessmen who work the 80 hour week. In my fathers generation three brothers owned three country stores. Long since gone. You tell the story well.
Aww. I feel that nostalgia when I run across my old business cards I had when I owned my own pharmacy. I think I’d just keel over in shock if someone found an old sign! I still have all the newspaper stories done on me and my little store. My local paper was good to me (and we did spend some serious money advertising in them as well). How nice to have that sign! Jealous!!!
What an incredible story to tell. Alabama is truly blessed to have you as one of its sons. thank you for all you do. You're a good man, bill rice and Lord knows.We could use more like you right now.
a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you And your family. May the good lord bless and keep you in the coming years.
Thank you very much, Ray Bob. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to your family.
Thanks for a great read Bill!
I wish you lived closer Bill. I would love to come visit you and your lovely family.
FYI - Richard was interviewed by Viva Frei today. Are you familiar with him?
As I just shared with you in an email, Richard's name came up in the Q&A after my talk to Exchange Club members. A few club members know Richard and know about the "embalmers clots." One lady was a fan of your website! I am not familiar with Via Frei. Can you send me a link via my email?
Just sent.
Lovely history. I have a free suggestion or two.
Formalise the running of your business (book keeping needs, online tools, legal issues, hints and tips) and then syndicate/franchise the operation with online or in person training events on how to run a small town online newspaper. Leverage your skill in the industry to bring in new blood. This way you could start to grow a larger pool of journalists that can keep their finger on more issues but distributed instead of centralised. Still keeping the reporters local but also have a link to the syndicated sites with a curated top story list that every editor thinks has a wider appeal or significance.
Then to enter the new century that we live in take a slice out of the biggest online revenue stream, advertising. Become an advertising syndicator. Take adverts from local companies (or whoever and add them tastefully as opt in adverts that curious people might want to view. Make the requirement for advertising copy to be attractive instead of demeaning, hateful, fearmongering and generally brainwashing. Your advertisers will then have a audience and you have interesting tit-bits to share. The local bookstore could run a sponsored crossword that can be printed or completed online. Run adverts AFTER the news, make them desert, demand advertisers reward potential customers instead of berating them, change the industry one small town at a time. Finally find a company that sells or leases affordable smart TVs that you can display your adverts on. Offer to place these inside local walk in shops, have them run adverts for the shop alternating with your news headlines and your syndicated adverts. Make it into a system that the big players cannot compete with because they want to use all you wall space or have crappy adverts, demand quality copy that people WANT to watch or read. Remember the subscription QR-code that people can scan to keep getting the full news stories.
I wish you great success and look forward to your association eclipsing the Murdoch empire. :-)
Wow. These are great suggestions. I love the concept of getting a syndicate of local Substack newspapers and then letting all members run the "greatest hits" or best stories from the combined group. And you could do something with advertising. I'm not real clear on how Substack treats advertising. I think a few Substackers ARE running some form of advertising.
You could put a scare into the mainstream corporate news organizations if enough real and local journalists pooled their resources and talents ... We might need to schedule a future Zoom call and brainstorm more on how to make something like this happen.
I think you would have to create the syndication platform outside SubStack which is not a free market. It can be used for the publishing of stories and subscriptions perhaps but not for the product that you want to create. You would have to have as much of the system open source as possible. The adverts get voted on and if they contain a falsehood they are immediately cancelled. Then based of family values, humor, ethics, morals, regenerative lifestyle, local ownership and tax responsibility and any other tags that people actually care about, points deducted for brainwashing techniques. The users would score an advert and the worse the score the higher the cost to show the advert. If the advert gets a 100% score you would charge very little, basically enough to cover costs of running the system, any adverts that abuse the customer must pay a high premium that makes PROFIT to compensate for the bad taste they leave. Advertiser is free to run AB testing (mandatory review costs for each variant) in sequence or concurrently and would hopefully strive to maximise score as this will be cheapest clicks and maximum customer satisfaction, the score would be visible with a radar chart that can be easily parsed by a glance. Bad adverts can be ignored and advertiser will go away.
Customers could then elect to view and rate adverts as required to gain extensions on their subscriptions. Advertisers would agree to pay for a set number of community critiques of any new advert they want to place and this money would be used to extend the subscription of the users.
The idea is to turn the paradigm on it's head. Make the journalists own the system and make the customers select the adverts and make the advertisers into the product and let them know up front instead of the hidden selling of customer details.
Oh, also no provision for any customer details to leak to the advertiser. No tracking links of any sort. They can check their click through by having a unique landing page for every campaign and people who click through from the adverts directly would leak the source page in the forwarder information (at that point they are no longer anonymous but they cannot be targeted because they are not visible until they click through.
So make advertising fun and profitable for the customer.
So with regard to the advertisers, make em pay. Social credit in reverse. Teach people what it is about and let the advertisers know that there is another way. Only noble companies and people would end up advertising and if all sales go to them then that would be a win. The various syndicated journalists/newspapers would obviously be able to run their adverts as well with similar terms and get compensated for views on their own platform.
The real issue here is that there is no way to publish anything for free, advertising is a evil that can be tamed if the user is in control.
A big project and above my pay grade but if done well and properly functioning it could work well, spread across the world and make you filthy rich. :-)
This is a BIG idea. As an "idea person" I love it and am intrigued. I've got so many projects I want to pursue, I don't know if I have time to pursue this one, but someone needs to. It's interesting that readers can be exposed to great ideas like this in the reader comments. IMO different models are needed for advertisers, subscribers/readers and "content providers.
Why not write an article one day after you have ruminated on the idea. Put out there your wish list of what you think might work and ask all your readers and any other writers to write about it.
I have mentioned my idea of user curated adverts perhaps 5-8 times in the last 5 years and you are the first to see value in it.
We cannot win the battle for world domination without revenue and the only ones who have it are the capitalists and the easiest way to grab a slice is from marketing, manufacturing and distribution are too capital intensive and monopolized with large barriers to entry..
We need to use the only tool we have, our attention span and our word of mouth and direct our purchasing power towards ethical advertising (which can be one of the main slogans to promote the internally complex system that has to be made easier to use than playing a mobile phone game, it could also incorporate a game vibe where you shoot down bad adverts and prop up the good ones, gaming the system has to be prevented by having invitation only access to the critique system and if someone is found to be a rotten apple everyone he invited and the person who invited him get pruned immediately and have to try re-enter somehow.
You could make not for profit resistance movement adverts run for free at say 10% of the bandwidth sort of as a tithe to get the word out but still curated for positive and truthful content by the customers.
A second feature I have proposed is to curate people. Anyone who has a Wikipedia page or is mentioned anywhere in politics, media , entertainment, WEF, YGL, masons Scientology, academia, healthcare or anywhere that people have leadership or manipulative powers. The people get voted on and if they lie on the record the lies are linked and recorded and they are scored, sort of like a social credit score for THEM instead of for US. This could be linked to a phone app and browser plug in that will put a red box around anything attributed to a bad person so that we can simply ignore it or block it out completely. Like a porn filter for propaganda, this could be sold to parents to provide to their children where political lies and porn are filtered out and kids do not get adverts for sugar and hormone treatment.
My coding skills ended with Pascal and C on PIC microcontrollers and this needs some god level database wizardry or I would try to do it myself.
There is also the Society of Problem Solvers (here on SubStack) who want to promote swarm intelligence that could tie in wit this where you have trust based groups that can discover solutions to complex problems.
Hi Bill and thank you. I am from a long line of small businessmen who work the 80 hour week. In my fathers generation three brothers owned three country stores. Long since gone. You tell the story well.