As a part of our goal to operate for the public benefit, Civic Spark Media and the Western Wayne News will provide regular updates to the community on our operations, health and future plans. This is our latest community report, reflecting activities for both the Western Wayne News newspaper and the WayneCounty.info news aggregator in 2024. We were not successful in producing these reports quarterly last year, so this is a full-year summary.
See also: 2023Q4, 2023Q3, 2023Q2, 2023Q1, 2022Q4.
—Chris Hardie, Owner and Publisher
By the Numbers
2024 Finances, January 1 – December 31, 2024
These financial reports are unaudited and unofficial, but we believe them to be complete and accurate as of this publishing. Rounded to the nearest hundred.
- Income
- Advertising sales: $226,900
- Newspaper subscriptions & individual sales: $297,900
- Miscellaneous income: $1,200
- Donations: $0
- Expenses
- Employee payroll & contractors: $274,800
- Newspaper printing: $69,900
- Postage & delivery: $35,900
- Rent, office expenses & utilities: $24,400
- Software and online services: $19,400
- Depreciation & amortization: $12,900
- Credit card processing & bank fees: $8,000
- Legal and accounting service fees: $3,700
- Travel: $3,500
- Advertising & marketing: $3,300
- Insurance: $3,100
- Other expenses: $500
We mostly invested our profit in to our employee profit sharing program, raising wages and adding benefits for our team, hiring new team members, corporate tax liability, and building up our savings to weather rising production costs and future revenue fluctuations.
Other Metrics of Interest
As of December 30, 2024
- Western Wayne News subscriber households
- Print: 3,300
- Online: 768
- Western Wayne News retail location copies distributed weekly: 600
- WayneCounty.info daily newsletter subscribers: 700
- Civic Spark Media team
- Full-Time Employees: 4
- Part-Time Employees: 2
- Contractors: 16
Milestones
Here are few items of note from 2024 outside of regular newspaper production:
- We switched to a new newspaper printing partner to increase reliability and improve the quality of our publication.
- We said good-bye to our longtime business manager Jenny Pugh who moved away from the area.
- We had several other staffing changes, including welcoming our legal advertising and obituaries coordinator Patti Peterson and our receptionist and customer service representative Suzy Kasztelan.
- Our news and photography team won various awards from the Society for Professional Journalists and the Hoosier State Press Association.
- We became a member of Free Press Indiana.
- We sent a representative to the LION Independent News Sustainability Summit in Chicago.
- We conducted additional listening sessions with groups and organizations in Wayne County to better understand community information needs.
- We continue to publish approximately two interviews per month on our Western Wayne News podcast and acquired sponsorship to help support the costs of producing the show.
- We experimented with producing short videos about events and people in the community.
- We updated our process of delivering publisher’s claim forms for legal notice advertising to ensure faster service for our advertisers and cost and time savings for our team.
- We provided in-depth coverage of the unusual total solar eclipse on April 8.
- We began experimenting with having some small groups of subscribers receive the paper from our delivery team members instead of using USPS postal delivery.
- We added a new “Kids Corner” feature to our printed publication.
- We were able to provide a summer internship for an area college student.
Challenges
Our two biggest challenges in 2024 were repeats from years past: maintaining and growing our staffing capacity and delivery issues with the U.S. Postal Service.
We’re continuing to explore solutions. For staffing that means an increased reliance on local and remote contractors, increasing pay and benefits as we’re able to attract new applicants, expanding our options for locations where local employees can work, and other related strategies.
For delivery issues we’ve continued to consolidate and pass along delivery issues and complaint to our contacts at the postal service, and as noted above we’re also experimenting with removing them from the mix in a few limited cases. Unfortunately, our options here are still very limited.