Hot Pursuit

Momentum worth reading.
If you’ve never considered subscribing to our newspaper before, this may be the time to do so because we have incredible momentum that makes us worth reading. We’re in a similar situation as to what a Twin Cities TV station went through years ago.  
Back in the early 1980s Gannett purchased KARE-TV in Minneapolis and took a little known TV news operation at the time and beefed it up into becoming the most watched news in Minnesota. During the rebuilding period, the station’s slogan was “momentum worth watching.”
But it didn’t happen overnight. It took many years to achieve ratings supremacy and become a news operation to be reckoned with. 
I was fortunate to work at KARE for a few years while this amazing turnaround took place at the hands of some of the best journalists in the country. I still remember one of the top news anchors in the country who has since gone on to Los Angeles compliment my writing abilities. 
On a much smaller scale, the Gannett transformation of KARE is what is happening with the Steele County Times. Over the past five years, we have taken the Blooming Prairie Times and turned it into a countywide newspaper loaded with 100 percent local news.    
The newspaper has grown beyond anyone’s wildest expectations. Readership has nearly tripled, sales have skyrocketed and the size of the newspaper has doubled with more news, features and sports coverage. 
We now offer another added value for readers. Within the past couple months, we have added a county sports editor to cover sports throughout the entire county. We’re offering more than just scores and rehashing games. Sports editor James Knoop is digging up sports feature stories from all the schools in the county. 
Besides more sports, we also continue to tweak our Hometown Living section. We now have pages in that section devoted to each community in the county. Most recently, Owatonna was the last community that we brought into the mix to highlight stories. 
The hometown section has become extremely popular and allows us to package news and features that often can’t found in any other news source. 
Steele County residents have shown me that they are hungry for a different alternative for local news coverage. We always strive to be in tune as to what citizens want. We want to put out a news product that readers will be proud of every time they pick it up. 
Each week we average 28 pages of news, and many times it’s even more. That’s an astonishing amount of space dedicated to the news of Steele County. In fact, out of weekly newspapers in the state, we have one of the highest page counts and the most news coverage. I read about 30 newspapers every week and find that most of them are 20 pages or less. And we knock the socks off some papers in much larger communities.
For example, Lakeville, a community of 56,000 residents, has a local newspaper that averages 20 pages a week. In comparison, Steele is a county with a population of roughly 35,000. 
The Steele County Times is a hot commodity. I think you’ll agree it’s a paper that may be worth your time to go in hot pursuit of getting every week.