Brian L. Steffens

”Starting up a newspaper is starting up a newspaper, wherever you are. Take away the first couple of chapters about the role of a free press, and the book is largely a how-to manual. Well, there are new papers starting up every month in the U.S. Mostly weeklies. Reporters fleeing the big city, husband and wife teams, all sorts of people can start up a paper. They don't need to buy million dollar presses; they can contract printing to a commercial printer. So they only need a few thousand dollars for a couple of computers and some software. But how to do it? There's need for a basic manual on how to create and run a paper. There's not much out there on that. Most of the how-to books are about journalism, how to interview, how to write, how to edit. There's not a lot out there on advertising, management theory and systems, bookkeeping, job descriptions, etc.”