You can't congratulate what you never heard about.
You already care. Keeping up is the hard part.
A beat is the set of businesses a reporter covers. We cover yours.
SEND US YOUR LISTWHAT ARRIVES
An edition, every week, under your masthead.
You name the businesses you have to stay current on. We read them — their own pages, the local press, the public record — and send back finished copy, dated, written to run. One place instead of forty tabs, and it is built around your list, not somebody's idea of your industry.
It goes out under your nameplate. Our name is not on it, the same way the wire service's name is not on the front page of your local daily. That is what this is: a wire service for one list instead of the world, which is why it can throw most of it away.
You publish what you want. You skip the rest. Nothing arrives that you did not ask to be covered.
THE ARITHMETIC
Count your list. Then count the minutes it takes to check one business properly — find the page, find the date, make sure it is your company and not a same-named one three states over. Multiply. Now do it again next week.
That is the number nobody on your staff has.
One communications director against several hundred member businesses is arithmetic, not a shortfall. Nobody could get to all of it. The Beat Newsroom does the reading so the desk can do the choosing.
We have not measured your hours and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Ask what an edition takes and the honest answer today is: we would want to build you one first and see if it is any good.
WHAT WE THREW AWAY
The product is the part we cut.
A week of reading turns up several times what ends up in print. An expansion runs. A new location runs. A fortieth anniversary runs. A Tuesday lunch special does not. Neither does anything we cannot date — if we cannot say when it happened, it is not an item. It goes in a hold pile with a note naming the one phone call that would fix it.
Every edition ships with an editor's note: what we read, what ran, what we held, what we cut, and why. When a week is quiet, it says so.
A wire that never has a slow week is not reading carefully.
WHO ENDS UP IN IT
A chamber paper prints what gets submitted. Submitting means somebody at that business has “send the chamber our news” written into their job. Most member businesses do not have that person, and the ones that do are the same ones that show up everywhere else.
So the bank's promotion runs and the flower shop's twentieth anniversary does not. Nobody decided that. It is what happens when the only way in is a form somebody has to remember to fill out.
We do not wait for the form. We read what the members already put out themselves — their own pages, the local press, the public record — and bring back the part that never gets sent in. Your quietest members still have news.
You already champion these businesses. This is the part your current tools cannot reach.
WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE
Below is a full week's edition. It is invented — every business, every event, and every date on it. We are not going to put a customer's paper on our own website, and a made-up town is the honest way to show you the format. The layout, the standard, and the proportions are real: five items out of twenty-two candidates, from 540 businesses, in one week.
THE SPACE IN THE PAPER IS YOURS
Every edition has room for local advertising, and that room belongs to you. You set the price, you sell it to your members, you keep all of it. We do not sell it and we do not take a share.
We print the sizes, the deadline and your contact on a sheet you can hand to anyone who asks.
TELL US YOUR LIST
There is no price on this page. The work changes shape with the list, and quoting before we have seen yours would be guessing.
Send us the names. We will read them for a stretch and show you what comes back — the items, the hold pile, and the cut list. Then we will both know what it is worth.
Call: 715-705-8100
Email: hello@thebeatnewsroom.com