Dan Kennedy Needs to Get Out of His Shell and Pick up a FREE COPY of the
MEDFORD NEWS WEEKLY
https://medfordnewsweekly.wordpress.com/
• A free for-profit newspaper. I’ve been talking about digital, but we shouldn’t rule out the idea of a free for-profit newspaper mailed to every household in Medford. Unlike a for-profit website, a free print newspaper is something that might be attractive to advertisers, especially if they knew everyone in the city would be receiving it.
I’ve been told that there was such a paper in Medford at one time, and that it stopped publishing after the Transcript came to town, backed by whatever chain was operating at that time. (Probably Community Newspaper Co., owned by Fidelity Capital and, later, the Boston Herald.)
Needless to say, there is one major potential problem facing anyone who might want to start a free newspaper: the upfront cost. You’d need to finance it until enough advertising came in to sustain it. If I were doing this (and I’m not), I’d want to conduct an extensive marketing survey and have a group of advertisers on board before I signed a contract with a printing company.
https://dankennedy.net/2020/07/13/together-we-can-do-something-about-local-news-coverage-in-medford/#more-21623
