Hillsboro Free Press and Buyer's Edge Member Profile
Hillsboro, Ks.
Story by Dwight Bitikofer
Hillsboro, Kansas is on the old Santa Fe Trail just a few miles east of its junction with the Chisholm Trail of cowboy cattle drive lore. It is in Marion County, in central Kansas, where the Flint Hills grasslands have dwindled to gentle rises and falls of rich farmland. It is home to small Tabor College, some light agricultural industry and a plant that processes honey and another that makes those little plastic honey-bear containers from which nature's best sweetener can be squirted.
Hillsboro was settled in the 1870s by Dutch-Low German Mennonite immigrants whose families had farmed for a century in Russia at the invitation of Catherine the Great. The Mennonites prospered in Russia, but successors to Catherine made it more and more difficult for the Mennonite pacifists to maintain exemption from military duty. They began to emigrate to places like the Santa Fe Railroad land grants in central Kansas. They brought with them Turkey Red winter seed wheat that eventually led to Kansas growing more wheat than any other state in the nation.
The Hillsboro Free Press and the Buyer's Edge live in a storefront on Main Street. Publisher Joel Klaassen was born in Minnesota, but moved to Hillsboro with his parents in 1955. He claims 2009 as his 50th year in the printing industry. Starting in 7th grade, he worked as a printer's devil for the Hillsboro Star Journal, the subscription paper that still survives in this town of 2,800 residents and 500 college students. During high school, he would go to the paper office to paste up grocery store ads after his Tuesday night basketball games. Klaassen paid his way through Kansas University working the pressroom of the Daily Kansan in Lawrence. After his university stint, he joined Jostens, the yearbook company for a few years before returning to printing presses in Lawrence and then Topeka, Kansas. He found himself back at the Star Journal selling ads for a short time in the late 60s. Klaassen's first brush with the free paper industry came in the mid-70s when he sold ads for a Wichita TV station's 110,000-circulation rack publication. After that shut down, Klaassen found himself back in Hillsboro where he and his wife both grew up.
In the 1980s, he worked as a real estate broker, but also dabbled in print. His wife, Nancy, was advertising manager at the Star-Journal during the 1980s. In 1990, he began commercial print sales for Print Source Direct, a company that produced tour catalogs, magazines and high school yearbooks. In 1995, he became owner of the business and renamed it Kansas Publishing Ventures.
Meanwhile, Nancy Klaassen had started a women's clothing store, Nancy's Fashions, on Hillsboro's Main Street. Joel Klaassen started a newsletter for her store. Other merchants wanted one too. The venture became The Hillsboro Advocate in 1996, a quarterly newsletter.
By 1998, it was time for something new, something that would directly compete with Klaassen's old employer. He rented a storefront and invested $2,000 in sheetrock and carpet. With money he had earned on a genealogy book for a family in Pennsylvania, he bought a computer and a Fax machine. The Hillsboro Free Press was born amid a clamor of skepticism that it could never survive. Eleven years later, its 7,500 papers are mailed weekly. (Kid carriers deliver Hillsboro itself).
The Free Press now goes to all homes in Marion County and parts of neighboring Chase, Harvey, McPherson and Morris counties. The 16-to-18 page broadsheet paper runs about 50 percent editorial copy. It carries news for Marion County towns and school districts, including six high schools and Tabor College. The paper successfully used its editorial influence to lead a fight against a sales tax proposal to build a "jail for hire" in Marion County. Special sections are numerous and include three sports sections each year for each high school.
Partner Don Ratzlaff is editor of the paper and coordinates the weekly news coverage and the special supplements.
Those supplements include such things as an annual Marion County resident and visitor guide, a county fair tab, gardening sections, Hillsboro's recent 125-year Commemorative Issue and a centennial publication for Tabor College.
Members of a local senior center volunteer to help the paper with its inserting and preparation for drop ship mailing. The company tracks the volunteer hours and makes an in-kind donation back to the senior center for the time its volunteers work.
In 2006, The Advocate became The Buyer's Edge. The shopper is mailed the first week of each month to 38,000 central Kansas homes in nine counties. It is especially strong in the Newton area, where one of its sales reps is based. The Buyer's Edge is a tabloid that runs 24-plus pages at about 70 percent advertising. It includes news and local events from each county it serves, a crossword puzzle and an opportunity to win $100 in Buyer's Edge Bucks to be spent with advertisers in the paper.
The Buyer's Edge earlier this year sponsored a Business Expo. The company brought in Tim Smith of IFPA Webinar fame. Clients were excited by Smith's advertising and marketing strategies and he has been invited back for February, 2010.
There are 10 employees at the company, including three full time sales staff members and one telemarketer. Seven of the 10 plan to attend the IFPA Trade Show and conference in Chicago in September. Other staff activities include things like all getting together for a Saturday garage sale with Klaassen making breakfast for everyone.
"We have an excellent staff," said Klaassen. "They all act like they own the place."
Klaassen will also be an exhibitor at the Free Paper Trade Show in Chicago. He also has a company called Kansas Publishing Ventures that publish genealogy and community photo books, an ongoing source of revenue for his company and one that is available to help other community papers, especially in a year when advertising revenue is down in many parts of the country. His office is stacked high with samples of hardbound community photo books his company has produced.
Klaassen said his company joined IFPA two years ago to take advantage of the circulation audits. He has also been active with Midwest Free Community Papers (MFCP) and currently serves on that organization's board. The paper is also a member of the Kansas Press Association.
Klaassen credits friendships in the free paper industry as a source of inspiration and energy he uses to overcome obstacles like economic downturns. He said the Free Press and the Buyer's Edge had a record year in 2008 and that so far in 2009 they are running ahead of last year. He said both inserts and ROP advertising are up. He said a decision to hold the line on ad rates is a concession they have made to the recession's effect on the papers' customers.
Away from the office, Klaassen experiments with computer, camera and video technology. He is the process of digitalizing old albums and cassette tapes. He and Nancy enjoy visits with their daughter and two grandchildren in Atlanta and a son in Yakima, Wash.
The papers have won excellence awards from MFCP. The Hillsboro Chamber of Commerce named them Business of the Year in 2008.
Klaassen said in July that he has written 570 straight columns for the papers "- partly nonsense and party observation." Even with a heart attack in 2004, he hasn't missed a week. At age 63, he considers himself in better health now than ever. He walks two miles a day and takes heart medication.
"You can't do this half way," he said of the publishing business. "It's full speed ahead or nothing!"
Writer Dwight Bitikofer publishes Webster-Kirkwood Times
in St. Louis and is an IFPA director. He is also a native Kansan from a farm about 10 miles west of Hillsboro.
|
|
