The next drink is on us: how we invited our readers into the newsroom and lived to tell the tale

If you’re ever in Newton, Kansas, on a Friday afternoon, plan to visit the Harvey County Now newspaper office.

You probably won’t find anyone in front of a computer screen out in the newsroom. Instead, you’ll discover our crew sitting in the back of the office, open beers in hand, as we chat with whichever community members decided to join us.

Beer Friday has been a part of HCN since we launched the paper a decade ago. We decided early on that we wanted to have a connection with each other and with our readers that extended past the pages of our publication each week.

In the past two years, we’ve gone far beyond those simple, informal gatherings with the creation of Press Club.

Press Club was part of a larger experiment to try new revenue streams. As a group that functions a bit under the philosophy of “let’s throw things at the wall and see what sticks,” we agreed to the experiment.

One of their ideas was a membership program.

We kicked around getting custom tote bags or coffee mugs a-la-NPR, but that just didn’t seem like our style, so after some debate (much of it over more beers), we decided that our membership program should be a social group — a way for us to connect with our readers and for our readers to connect with each other.

In designing our membership program, we thought about what kind of social interactions were lacking for people in Newton. Despite being a community of about 20,000, Newton unceremoniously shuts down in the evenings. Want to grab drinks with someone? Hope you like Applebee’s. Want to attend after-hours events? Sorry. The chamber only does breakfasts.

Enter Press Club.

As a Press Club member, you’re invited to mingles every third Thursday from 5 to 7 p.m. Sometimes, they’re at the newspaper office. Sometimes, they’re hosted by local businesses, but they always feature a good snack spread, adult beverages and casual conversations. There’s no agenda. Nobody is holding a reporter’s notebook. It’s just a time to socialize.

In addition to mingles, we leverage advertising trade-outs (old-fashioned bartering between us and advertisers) to give members free stuff, from event tickets to public hangouts.

Our mingles normally draw anywhere from 20 to 40 people. At a recent one, we had the mayor, a bank vice president, several retirees, a young entrepreneur and the owners of the bowling alley hanging out in our office, all chatting with each other and our newspaper staff.

When we launched Press Club, we created it as an add-on for our print subscribers. To be a member, you paid us the $60 for your annual subscription and an additional $60 to be in the club ($90, if you and a housemate wanted to both participate).

We also sold sponsorships to local businesses. We charged $1,500 for an annual sponsorship, which included their name on any Press Club advertising and 15 free memberships to give to their employees.

Doing it that way gave us an immediate base of members, so our mingles were well-attended right from the start. It also gave us the starting cash we needed to host our get-togethers.

To launch the club, we wrote a story about it in the newspaper, had a column from the publisher about it on the opinion page and advertised it in our e-newsletter. We also offered the first mingle as a free event so people could see what it was like.

The first several mingles were in our office. Between food, beer and wine, we normally spend about $200 for each one.

We also put out the call that we were looking for “mingle hosts” to our sponsors, local nonprofits and other businesses. When someone else hosts, they buy all of the supplies. We provide the advertising (and the crowd).

Attendance at mingles has been interesting. We learned that if the University of Kansas and Kansas State University happen to be playing one another on a third Thursday, we won’t have much of a crowd. The same is true for the Thursday right before Thanksgiving.

We have also had some readers balk at the idea of attending an event that featured alcohol. With that in mind, we’ve started experimenting with morning coffee hours.

We trade advertising for perks for our member freebies, mostly with advertisers in the big city next door who wouldn’t normally run ads in our paper. Those partnerships have yielded member perks such as suite nights at the minor league baseball stadium and free concert tickets at a local venue.

We also traded advertising with the bowling alley for an afternoon of bowling. We told Press Club members to bring the whole family out, and we covered the shoe and lane fees. At a recent mingle, we held a drawing for ticket and ride packages to the Kansas State Fair. It’s no surprise: people love free stuff.

After several months of holding mingles and hanging out with our readers, we discovered that it was far more than just an additional revenue stream. We were getting to know our community in a new way, and we were meeting readers we would have never had an opportunity to meet in any other way.

We also started to realize that we had fans. Our readers loved what we did and wanted to support us. In the most shocking turn of events, Press Club led us to increase our subscription price — by a lot. We more than doubled the price, writing an in-depth story about ourselves and our struggles and publishing it on the front page. Today, if you want to subscribe to HCN, it won’t cost you $60 per year anymore. It’s now $144.

The response has been humbling and validating. A year later, we’ve only lost around 10 percent of our subscriptions, our digital subscribers are up, and rack sales are increasing, too.

And Press Club changed, as well. As a part of the price increase, we decided to make every print subscriber an official member of Press Club instead of making it an additional buy. We have new folks joining us all the time, in addition to a few of our diehard regulars. Being able to participate in Press Club has sold a few subscriptions to people who were new in town, as well.

I won’t lie. This process has not been perfect or easy. There have been a few mingles where it was just our staff and about six other people standing around instead of a nice, robust crowd. We had a reader send in his renewal but write in the margins that he didn’t want to hear anything about our mingles because he didn’t want to attend our “beer bashes.”

And it does take some time to set up food and drinks and ensure the newspaper office is in a presentable enough condition for company every month. (Have you ever seen a clean reporter desk?)

The benefits have outweighed the challenges and the time commitment, though, as we’ve been able to be a whole new part of our community.

I don’t think Press Club would work in every community, or at least not like it does in Newton. Our chamber wasn’t filling the role that many do, so the monthly mingles made sense for us, but they might not in a community with a robust group already holding after-hours events.

My advice: figure out the best way to connect with your readers, and then do it. Is it having cookies and punch once a month at your office? Is it buying a few carafes and giving away free cups of coffee at your local coffee shop? Is it having some weekend events for families?

Just start somewhere. It doesn’t have to be complicated. It doesn’t have to be expensive. But connecting with your readers is one of the most invaluable things you can do for the health of your publication.

People in Newton don’t necessarily support “the media,” but they do support Joey and Lindsey and Adam and Bruce over at Harvey County Now.

I’d love to say all you have to do is “build it, and they will come,” but it does take the commitment of putting out a quality product each week and a willingness to be vulnerable and invite the public into your newsroom. Oh, and having a few beers on hand certainly doesn’t hurt.

Lindsey Young, along with husband Joey, is the majority owner of Kansas Publishing Ventures, which oversees the publication of three weekly newspapers in south central Kansas. They are becoming increasingly known for their innovative approach to business—implementing everything from an annual blues concert in their community to hosting readers monthly for drinks and conversation for Press Club and creating an on-demand journalism training program called Earn Your Press Pass.