Forum topic: This month's Enfield Dispatch is the biggest yet!

Great excitement in the Twittersphere!

The Dispatch's editor James Cracknell, its sales manager @KisssKlaudia and their boss David Floyd have all expressed their pleasure at the expansion of the Dispatch from 16 to 20 pages this month. No big deal, you might think...

To put this in context; we've been making our monthly community papers for nearly six years and no edition has been bigger than 16 pages - until now. @EnfieldDispatch has started to break even after attracting more advertising, which enables us to print more pages. Good times!

— James Cracknell (@JollyJourno) January 30, 2020

I want to do a short thread on this - as readers who are familiar with publications varying the number of pages they print from issue to issue may be thinking: "why are those eccentric people at Social Spider so excited about a slight increase in the size of their newspaper?" https://t.co/tms8LwFyix

— David Floyd (@davidsocialsp) January 31, 2020

Here are all the tweets in David's thread combined using Spooler:

I want to do a short thread on this - as readers who are familiar with publications varying the number of pages they print from issue to issue may be thinking: "why are those eccentric people at Social Spider so excited about a slight increase in the size of their newspaper?"

One of our community newspapers @EnfieldDispatch has been expanded from 16 to 20 pages. This is a great achievement and I am proud of our team at Social Spider CIC. #communitynews #localjournalism #localnewspaper #success https://t.co/FLd2XYv19E

— MissKiss (@KisssKlaudia) January 31, 2020

The reason @KisssKlaudia @JollyJourno and I are so excited about this is that the #socent model we operate to publish @EnfieldDispatch @WFEcho @tottenhamcp and @Ec1Echo is based on publishing the best possible local newspapers being the focus of what we do. We love the local business, charities & public sector agencies that advertise with us - and we think it's socially useful to help them get their messages out to local people - but we wouldn't bother publishing newspapers solely to be vehicle for advertising. Our approach

... is in @johnbirdswords classic terminology "a business solution to social problem". Advertisers, by advertising in @EnfieldDispatch @WFEcho @tottenhamcp & @Ec1Echo are successfully promoting what they do - but they're also buying into & supporting much needed local journalism. Because local news is the point for us, we have a principle of guaranteeing that a minimum of 50% of each newspaper we publish is editorial rather than advertising. That means the more advertising we sell, the more local news we can report, the more we can hold power to account..... and the more we can give people and organisations within our communities the chance to tell each other what they're doing and understand each other better. The fact @EnfieldDispatch is now selling enough advertising space to enable us to publish some extra pages shows that this approach can work - and we hope to see similar developments with our other publications in the near future. #socent