Looking ahead to the Outlook’s future
By Don Porterfield
Happy Birthday to The Southeast Outlook.
When I came to the newspaper in the fall of 2008, I found a team not only committed to Christ, but also committed to their work. It is a joy to start each day with a group of folks focused on serving our readers, advertisers and the Lord. My goal has been to filter, polish, and implement the best of what I’ve learned from a 40-year
newspaper career spent working with newspapers of similar size. The help and support I’ve received from everyone has made that work very fulfilling.
Our growing church family translates into a growing mailing list for the newspaper, as all new members begin receiving the newspaper shortly after they join the church. Each week we label and mail approximately 18,500 copies of The Southeast Outlook, and they are delivered in all 50 states. In addition to our mailing list, we
deliver close to 9,000 rack copies to over 400 locations within a 20-mile radius of the church. All of this happens due to the extraordinary efforts of a team of 30 or so volunteers, who approach their work each and every week with a loving and giving heart for the newspaper. Quite frankly, this is a service that we’d be unable to pay for
from our operating budget.
I’m happy to report that the fundamentals needed by the newspaper to serve the growth of our church family are in place. The revenue needed for us to operate comes from advertising, which makes up 80 percent of our budget, and donations, which make up the remaining 20 percent. The Lord has continued to provide the needed
funds for the newspaper, and I’m confident that if we trust and work through Him, that will continue. We’ve spent a great deal of energy the past two years identifying what costs are necessary to operate, and we have trimmed those costs we no longer need. All businesses, even non-profits like us, need revenues to exceed
expenses, and with the support of our advertisers and donors, we continue to do that.
By now you’ve heard about the new Mission/Vision of the church. As we continue to develop synergy between the church and the newspaper, you’ll note a growing partnership between our news columns and the goals and objectives of the church. As you’d expect with a church our size, there is no shortage of news items each
week, be it events, meetings, celebrations or feature stories. Our goal in the coming months will be to grow our pages to communicate fully the needs of our growing church, thus the need to grow revenue to cover expenses will continue to be very important.
I’m often asked what role the Internet should play with The Southeast Outlook. Our web presence will continue to evolve, but I don’t expect it to surpass our printed product any time soon. Replacing a print product with an Internet-only version isn’t as easy as many people think. Currently, no viable business model exists in the public
sector that underwrites the level of in-depth reporting you see every day in a newspaper. I feel that nugget of knowledge also applies to The Southeast Outlook for the foreseeable future.
The Internet is a wonderful basket of information, both large and small, and an unmatched repository of lists and directories, but quite frankly, it’s not very local. The vastness of the Internet is amazing. Google searches for words like, Religion, Saved, Christ, Jesus and Sin reveal some interesting results. Religion is highest at 704
million sites, followed by Sin at 665 million. Saved is found on 432 million sites. Jesus and Christ are found on 305 million and 196 million respectively.
Though an Internet version of our newspaper is a great destination for readers who may live out of town, it can’t replace the interaction you’d have in person through our pages and visits to the church campuses. We need to serve the out-of-town group, but not at the expense of what we do best in print. Social networking isn’t going
away, and I’m sure our newspaper will evolve in that arena, as well, but the ever increasing clutter of communication technologies force many to the curb. For instance, remember when you carried a cell phone just to make phone calls? Or even better, remember when you didn’t have a cell phone?
Here’s a short list of what I hope to see for our newspaper before we celebrate another significant birthday. We hope to continue increasing our pages to cover the ever-growing needs of a growing church. We also want to prayerfully consider and implement a presence on alternative channels of distribution, while not harming our
core print product. In the media game you’d call that “re-purposing content,” and it is my hope that we can expand our message across other viable media. We want to continue employing folks who see the work of the newspaper as a ministry that just happens to also be a business—a business that is unique to the newspaper community. And, we want to do all of that in a workplace singularly focused on spreading the Good News of God’s love.
It is my prayer that all of us at The Southeast Outlook go forward with respect for our past and diligence toward our future. Though different media will come and go, God’s love is everlasting. I sincerely want to thank every reader, every advertiser and every financial supporter for helping us do what we do each day.
Don Porterfield is the general manager of The Southeast Outlook.