 | | | Our prototype
| | | | | | September 2006:
The question I've been asked most frequently over the last five years is, "What made you decide to start a paper?" The answer:
We hosted a "Meet the Candidate" party for a Moraga Town Council member. One of Wendy's colleagues told the story of a friend who started a newspaper. Everybody at my table said, "We need a paper here!" -- I said, "I can do a paper."
October/November 2006:
Development of our business plan, naming and prototype design
December 2006:
Reached out to a printing company in Toronto Canada for pricing and logistics. 50 copies of our prototype arrived just before Christmas, 2006.
1st official presentation of the prototype to the three Chambers of Commerce at the Lafayette Chamber of Commerce office. They all liked what they saw.
January-March 2007
Recruited writers and meeting with City/Town management to introduce the concept.
March 7, 2007
11 delivery teams of St. Mary's and high school students took a practice run of their delivery routes to get used to the roads and area.
March 12/13, 2007
Layout of issue #1 in our home office until early morning. At 5:00 a.m. the Toronto printer called to confirm "Ready to print." At 9:00 p.m. I picked up the first issue at San Francisco International Airport after it arrived on an Air Canada flight.
March 14, 2007
First delivery day! The 11 delivery teams prepared their loads of papers on the parking lot of the Moraga Town offices (our thanks to the Town.) I remember one phone call from a concerned citizen in Lafayette: "...they are throwing the papers all over the place!"
March 21, 2007
Switch from delivery to mail -- delivering the paper ourselves was too complicated.
April 18, 2007
Change from weekly to bi-weekly, realizing that we could not stay in business publishing on a weekly basis. Back to delivery to save some money, this time using a delivery company. Switch printing from Toronto to Southern California because of several air freight delays.
June 27, 2007
Became frustrated with delivery woes and switched back to mail to assure more reliable delivery.
January 23, 2008
Bumped into a page count limit with our printer and moved our printing to the Press Democrat in Santa Rosa.
August 20, 2008
Start of our unique database system for archiving all our stories on our web site.
2011
Increasing page count (36 pages) forced us to stabilize the business and we looked for a reliable delivery service and a commercial printer with higher capacity.
Switched to Blackhawk, our current delivery service, and Transcontinental, our current printing company. After five years, I think our printing and delivery woes are finally behind us.
Some statistics:
Page count:
March 14, 2007 = 16 pages
March 19, 2008 = 24 pages
March 18, 2009 = 24 pages
March 17, 2010 = 34 pages
March 16, 2011 = 36 pages
March 14, 2012 = 44 pages
3,558 pages published -- about 6,000 stories have been told.
All of our stories, from our first issue on, are available on our web site.
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The second most frequently asked question is, "How is the paper doing?" The answer: "Considering the hard time newspapers are having competing in the digital age we can say that we are doing very well. We look forward to the next five years."
Thank you for being a reader!
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Lamorinda Weekly, Moraga CA