currently covers all of the area around mercer county and in parts beyond and we'll be having a great conversation about newspapers and journalism and how us one got started and hopefully  rich grew up in an upstate new york would love to know how you found your way to princeton university where from which she graduated and the equal interest is why you decided to stay so let's just jump right in it's now been over thirty years since you took the plunge and what motivated you to do that and what was your thinking well i really caught the journalism bug in high school in upstate new york and my father said you know everybody done lots of people love the person who can play a piano and people also like the editor of the newspaper you want to do one of those things and i looked at the piano i said was that's way too hard there's no way so i jumped into the school paper got excited about it a little bit i delivered papers for the big into an evening press pick up some extra money and won a newspaper boy scholarship little congratulatory letter and he said if if it any time we can ever be of help to you just let me know i said i've been looking for a summer job so so i immediately reached out to him asked for a summer job i got one and the summer job was even more exciting than the school newspaper and then i came off to princeton as a student and got active on the daily princetonian and became editor in chief of the of the princetonian in those days there was a connection there for a brief period of time starting i think with frank de ford the who became a legendary sports writer there was a connection between the editor ship of the princetonian and a plum summer job  time incorporated and we were still on that track and i won the election for the editors post and sure enough i get a call from time magazine our recruiters come about i want to stop in the c m so i got a with time and that led to a job after after college and then i just wanted to try something else and i became a freelance writer on it time was very much into the group journalism approach and i was trying to you know work my own voice and get my own style going so i became a freelance writer and nearly starved for for five years finally build up a little bit of business but i could see the the  enormous amount of people competing to be freelance writers and and i thought maybe there's another way around like i got the idea for us one and i said if i start my own paper then at least i'll have a paper that will set my stories i'll finally have an outlet for my stories so i did that and the paper took off yond what i ever thought it would really and and it sort of grew along with the the root one quarter it is  hope that most of our readers are familiar with it and if they aren't they will be intrigued enough to read it but give us your how you how you describe the paper because it has a certain angle yes it's u s one is a business and entertainment publication and that and on a daily basis but as people would say neither one of them was the best selling daily paper in princeton the rule of best selling one is the new york times and then we had the town topix the princeton packet there was a princeton shopping center had its own newspaper called the princeton shopping center news there was a thing called the woman's newspaper which was coming out once a month and then there was us one and i said our community really and i guess if there was a genius or just a lucky stroke on my part it was recognizing that our community wasn't really reachable at their homes they were coming into this into the the world community from bucks county from east windsor west windsor some from princeton but they were coming from all sorts of different places but what they had in common was the work place so i said why don't we deliver it to their place of business so the delivery was the only one of its kind of weird that was our niche was that we would deliver to people at their office as opposed to at their home so that's what separated us right there and i think it's what helped the paper grow ok one of the things i noticed when i was looking at some of the  one newspapers how do you decide on what appears on the front cover and how are assignments manias and stories handed out and the journalistic credo of the paper well  that drive us to you to do a particular cover story for example we knew adrian hyde who is that was the new relatively new executive director of the no for ne organic farming association and he had written an op ed piece in us when a couple weeks before this appeared and he had some forthright discussions and you could some people would disagree with some of the farmer so you know it doesn't look like your typical farmer here but he does own a farm and just outside of princeton he and his wife live downtown and i saw that there was a seminar coming up sponsored by his organization that would tell you what you needed to know if you wanted to form a farm and i know that obviously if there are any number of business people former business people in the princeton community who have given up the rat race their commute to wall street in new york and have used some of their spare money to buy a few acres and set up a farm so there's a there's a desire to do this it's not as as as bizarre as it might sound so i said this is the time to do adrian story and introduce readers to the upcoming of that so this is an example where we knew we had an interesting person and then we saw an event that we could tie into it and a lot of our a lot of our cover stories are dictated by that combination so somebody else say to me there's a great guy very interesting great person a woman fascinating person and i said well why should we do now so if they can answer that question why now then we got the interesting person the relevant thing that sort of puts them in the news and we've got a potential everything years you care a lot you seem to care a lot about princeton and the surrounding community and so i'll just get right right to it and ask are you optimistic about this area as optimistic as you were when you started some thirty four years ago but i am i think that the i mentioned when i was starting out i was you know just above all above starvation we may all have to go back down to that level and then pour cells back out again said in newspapers as a reflection of its community so princeton's of the princeton business community that we were targeted as a great little business community when you get in to meet the people it's it's unusual it's got a lot of variety of small businesses as big businesses they work together well i said this paper ought to be good because it's reflective of the community that it serves so we've got a great community we ought to make sure the papers lives up to it so the community is still good and how it's going to get its local news may change drastically in the future although may not change as quickly as we think it might print may survive longer than basis and we have a younger audience the teams to be graduating more toward the electronic means of being informed and so how do print papers like us one survive you know in such an of vironment and  cuts the competition with the online and video newscasts well i think it's it's not easy it's not it's not the way it used to be and we've certainly all the print papers of certainly scaled back in their in their reach and their size  the number of full time reporters is less at almost all print papers in our area in print fact around the world for that matter you're seeing more part time people so called also and we certainly are doing this are moving our are putting our information on line as well as in print we're having available on our website princeton info dot com  people there are people who go to our events database which is that princeton info dot com and we have a day by day event service there you click on a link that says what's happening today in princeton n j and all of our all the events that are in any one issue or the paper will be there we've got people who are who are going to that and aren't even aware that we have a print paper so there's the times are changing we're still good the the trick is to keep the audience into one is to keep your audience and build your audience and then trick number two which no one has figured out yet except be a math like facebook amazon netflix and google for example community papers are still trying to figure out a way to monetize their content and streamline their operations so they can afford to be sustainable on that on that new income level you mentioned on it i'm curious whether you think that this area and i'm going to say princeton flash central new jersey because we have a number of local papers that now seem to be trying  pennington and more infill across route one are we do leading or lagging in this area generally in order there is some some places in the country that have best practices that you that have impressed you is  doing a good job of local i call it hyper local news coverage and or commentary you know i'm not i'm not the greatest expert on the world outside of princeton i've got a net i've lived in the bubble for a long time that the students at the university refer to it as the orange bubble i think it also extends a little bit into the into the central new jersey area i'm trapped in it to a certain extent but i think we're doing pretty well and i think we're we're also aware that we need to get better so it's it's good but there's a cosmopolitan audience that would that we serve and and they give us they give us feedback and they  demanding in certain ways and i and i think we hear from them and that's that helps make us better so i i can't say they were leading the way but we're moving we're moving in the right direction to the young to young people by young under thirty never you and i think you and i are relatively same vintage in any didn't trust anybody under thirty what we encourage yeah yeah yeah so are they even aware of what's going on with the local journalism effort there are they if they are not as aware as we were at that at that age and one of the one of the things is the yvel value of everything on their smartphone and our little paper can come to them on their smartphone too but but having that smart phone and you've got a chance of your seat and see some news and you've got the you know the thing about the school school board referendum and whether or not we should spend some more money for the school expansion the one side or you've got the latest gossip come out of washington pretty salacious that sounds kind of kind of interesting and guess what they think they go over to washington  people give out grades average i'm putting together and all that what we try to do is is we try to maximize the number of people who get into print and we do we we go through and we do make selections but it's based on the criteria are are there a member of our community because there are we could easily this could easily be taken over by poets and troops to writers from around the world who are eager to get into print and so we say are they from the greater princeton business community to the live work here that's number one and then number two if they haven't been in a long time we actually have a database that keeps track of people on the entries so if somebody has not been in they've submitted five or six things in a row we go out of our way to try to get in then we can and then also we look for connections and you'll see so in every in every issue there's a little clusters of stories that might something that might might be several stories that revolve around workplace romance that's kind of fun and move we have a poem we say you know put it together and create a little a little package of stories a subset of this whole issue that revolves around that one subject so do you have when you say w poetry and again looks at things that make sense they're from local people sometimes some poems just don't make any sense and we just can't figure out were those and and so once in a while we still run one of them but but that might be a reason to say this one we don't have room for and and then once it's all together we just try to we try to get as much stuff in there as we can because it's a wonderful event and most of these people are thrilled because the if it's bad enough for journalists to find print outlets but for poets and short story writers those are those venues started drying up about forty years ago so when time  anything about the dates that you can tell if you have the the the first the first monday or let's say yeah the first or second monday in june would be the deadline for the two thousand and eighteen  eighteen and so people that i don't know i think i have thoroughly enjoyed it over the years reading and and also for busy people busy business people i think it's a great change of pace the theory that you know coverage the other thing we do and then and in august we invite everybody who submitted whether there were printed or not we invite everybody to join us at a reading and literary event in the month of august so we get to meet the people in person the poets read their poems we've talked about the short stories and just a nice nice way to interact with the readership which is what i think is going back to that whole idea of keeping readers i think the interaction with the readers is the thing that we can do locally that you or c n n or fox or m s n b c or whatever they're not going to interact with anybody really except sources and they're commentators so we we have that local connection that we need to keep alive and this is one of the things that doesn't very so when you think about it day by day running of a business this was for us one of the some of the factors that come into play subscriptions we have so far very limited revenue that comes from on line most of the most of our advertisers actually prefer to be in print it's got a little less more lasting value it's it's  it's in front of people who are physically in our neighborhood as opposed to line their ad may be seen by a million people nine hundred ninety nine thousand of whom could be around the world we don't know where they are so the so that we are relying on those advertisers we are mindful as the as the editor and formerly the publisher although i've now merged with another another small company and i've taken over leave the editorial duties and i have two partners who do the publishing but but all three of us as as owners of the enterprise are aware of who the advertisers are and there are sometimes some some difficult moments where we said we really want to run the story customer of a paper like this is not the advertiser the real customers the reader so you don't want to lose your reader because without the readers the advertisers wouldn't find any value so we we are a small community even if somebody is not an advertiser and a community newspaper i think you think twice before you hammer somebody with a an expos that makes them look irredeemably bad i'd rather make somebody look redeemability bad they know they they they they goofed up but you know they they can do better the next time always have some hope in the air and i try to try to offer a little bit of that but we still get some angry phone calls and now angry now so there's part of the challenge what i think to me this leads nicely into the question about what if so what advice do you give to young people we've heard how this is a tough first moved back into princeton after time magazine i reached out to a bunch of writers and time i asked mcphee what's your advice to a young journalist and he said try everything try if you know if you've written three thousand were articles try a three hundred word of toil try straight news try feature news try sports try your hand and he said you never know you might be you might struggle as a three thousand word feature writer and you might be the world's greatest three hundred word editorial writer you don't know  so i would say that advice still applies today and i would i would update it by saying try the different media don't just say it's all got to be on line take a take a look at what the print world is doing because that's going to exercise another part of your brain look at look at the look at the on line look at the at the print and the matter what happens in the world the the the thing that's going to hold journalism togethers stores people who still are looking for stories so be a storyteller and don't get too hung up on whether this this whether or not this particular app is going to survive the next two years or this newspaper is going to be around in five years just look for good stories and somebody will want to publish them somehow on line in print whatever maybe you can tell us a ritual bit about how readers described who are can find  copy of us one in this area and maybe talk a little bit more about your vision for us one in years to come yeah the the paper is about eighteen or nineteen thousand copies are circulated every wednesday they go to about four thousand different business offices we still have that that same pattern that began with day one did we deliver into individual offices whenever possible so if we go over to the carnegie center instead of leaving a stack on the ground floor we try to go into up to the third floor and go down the hall and drop them into everybody's office we actually gain some news information by doing that we see who's coming in who's going so we still do that we also have boxes on nassau street which are helpful for people who don't have an office around here the y has stacks the gymnasium the look of fitness centers have stacks fitness centers are great places for print newspapers who go to the to the gym i don't understand that they go it's wonderful and they like to read so it's probably a good new good thing that they do both and also out of the train station so their boxes free free boxes open the box grab a paper and and go with it as far as the vision lou boy keep keeping it connected to the readership and keeping it sustainable are those are the goals and i think the i think the print and online combination is is a good one i wanted to see that go as long as it's economically feasible because i think some people still appreciate something in their hands  actually feel that they can feel half of the tangible and you know the the new york times had a story recently about a guy who'd given up all of his electronic devices and and just went with print for a while and you know you talk but for now thank you very much stay healthy the active and we'll see you next week another edition of open source