By Malcolm Butler
(lpjnewsla@gmail.com)
It’s been 18 months since Kyle and Judith Roberts and myself took over as the publishers for the Lincoln Parish Journal.
Wow, how times flies.
Over the past year and a half we have spent a lot of bandwidth working towards making the LPJ your go-to, reliable, free media outlet, a source for information that you can turn to on a daily basis for fair and accurate coverage. We feel we have made tremendous strides. And based on the feedback we have received, so do our readers.
But the job is never done. We are always looking for ways to make it better.
We have a great team at the Lincoln Parish Journal. And we are proud of their work towards the above mission. It’s truly a team effort.
One thing that can help us is for our readers to send us already written news releases, story ideas, and other suggestions. Full disclosure: we can’t cover everything. But our goal is to cover as much as possible.
If you are a local school (elementary, junior high, high school) send us information about what is going on at your school. We would love to run your honor roll. We would love to run information about your homecoming court (I do think we got all of those this year), your student council elections, etc. If you have a story, send a photo with it. Sometimes we will have the time to write it ourselves and sometimes we won’t. But we sure can’t cover it if we don’t know about it.
If you are an area high school coach, answer your phone when we call or text. Coming from the college athletics background, I believe in writing a story win, lose or draw. What I don’t believe in is only covering a team when they win. We can’t cover every high school sports team in Lincoln Parish on a daily basis, but we do our best to cover as much as we possibly can. Help us provide coverage for your teams, coaches. Answer our calls or texts in a timely basis. Most are awesome at this. Some, well, we may need to run a few stadiums.
The LPJ exists because of advertising dollars. And we have some great advertising partners at the Lincoln Parish Journal. This wouldn’t be possible without you. Thank you.
A lot of times we receive emails or calls wanting us to cover something that is business related. We have to draw a line on free advertising, especially on for-profit events or businesses. However, we have very affordable advertising rates and are happy to come visit on how we can help your upcoming event or your business.
And we’ve had great success with helping promote events through our email ride alongs and advertorials. Just send us an email (lpjnewsla@gmail.com) and we will provide advertising rates and additional information.
The LPJ is free to read. It will always be free to read. We won’t ever put our content behind a pay well. That’s not our business model. We know how frustrating it can be to start reading a story and not be able to finish because its behind a pay wall.
At the end of the day, we want to help Lincoln Parish residents know the going-ons in our communities. Email us at lpjnewsla@gmail.com if you have something that you feel is worth us covering. Again we can’t cover everything, but we will sure give your story idea our consideration.
Finally, thanks to our readers. Our numbers continue to grow as we exceeded 2.2 million views last calendar year and through our first two months of 2023, we are on pace to shatter that mark.
The Lincoln Parish Journal … for Lincoln Parish residents written by Lincoln Parish residents.
