Last week, our editor, Amy Roe, was at Trader Joe's and saw firsthand what we're up against. The Real Change vendor there made a sale, but when the customer handed him the dollar she waved the newspaper away: "Oh, no thanks, you keep that."
"You should take it," he said. "It's a great paper."
"Oh. ... Alright."
We understand that sometimes you want to help and simply don't want one more thing to read, but please take the paper anyway. Give it to someone else. Our vendors aren't asking for handouts. They're proud of what they do and want you to get value for your dollar.
Our Trader Joe's guy could have kept the paper and made another buck, but he cared more that Real Change be read. Vendors love it when people tell them we're the "best paper in Seattle." When readers value the paper, our vendors feel valued, and that, dear reader, is the whole point.
A half-dozen years ago, as we prepared for weekly publication, we convened focus groups to learn what people thought of us. We found that street newspapers have a built-in branding problem. People often assume that homeless people produce the paper, and that the audience is other homeless people. What follows from this is the assumption that Real Change is basically a thin excuse to hand a buck to someone in need.
This is not a set-up for vendor success.
So we asked ourselves what could change. We lost the self-defeating and inaccurate tagline, "Puget Sound's Newspaper of the Poor and Homeless," and reinvented ourselves as a broadly progressive community newspaper. We designed ourselves to look the role and draw people in, added more color, and printed on brighter paper. In 2005, we hired two new professional journalists. One of these, Rosette Royale, is still here and has an armful of awards for his work.
Since then, our circulation has grown by 87 percent.
We're thrilled to welcome our two new staff: Award-winning reporter Aaron Burkhalter comes to us from the Skagit Valley Herald, a Mount Vernon daily, where his beats have included social services and education. Aaron has a master's degree in journalism from the University of Oregon.
Jon Williams brings more than 15 years of design and layout experience at the The Kitsap Sun and The Sacramento Bee, where he also worked as a photographer and copy editor. An accomplished illustrator, Jon enjoys creating works with pencil and paintbrush. He received a bachelor's degree in photojournalism from San Jose State University.
We're proud of our award-winning news staff, and we're proud to publish a paper that our vendors want you to read. Real Change is here to inform you on the issues you care about and to help our vendors succeed. We're all in this together. Thanks for reading.