Sunday, May 9, 2010

Local News far away

Just started a new business of bringing the local newspaper to the expats.
the give me their hometown zip code and chose the type of news they want: Sports, politics, Crime, Classified ads, etc including any names or keywords they choose. I get all the info from an online crawler and publish it as a newspaper. It is a weekly that I can either mail to them or email to them. Some of these folks have on-line newspapers back home but they prefer my version as it only gives them the specific type of news they are looking for. But most of my customers are from small towns with no newspaper. Their news is one page or one column of a nearby city paper. Only about have the news comes from on-line newspapers. The rest comes from Government websites, Social Networks, and sites from local businesses, radio station websites, and other organizational sites such as politcal parties, lobby groups, and non-profit organizations. My computer program does the search work for me once I plug in the paramaters. it even groups related threads from various sources. I leave the source reference in the story so I don't have to take the time to validate accuracy. My news articles end up being a headline and short paragraph of the story followed by ta list of statements from the various sources. I gather the info from Saturday thru Friday and then spend Saturday morning putting the newspapers together for my customers. I charge a dollar a week for 3 to 20 Pages. Discounted price is 30 dollars for a year which is a real bargin. I've put a hold on any more customers since I have 500 now and that takes me abount a half hour per day to check the status and fine tune the searches. and about 4 to 6 hours on Saturday to create the newspapers and deliver them. If I got anymore customers I'd have to hire an assistant which I need to do anyway in case some week I am not available to do it. But once I find the right person I will have to train them to use my secret program that will take a few weeks. It maybe that I can franchise this out so it can be done in other areas. Right now I'm limiting my customer base to this one Island in Japan where I happen to be spending a lot of time lately.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I don't know what to think.

Walter Mitty said...

Whatever Walter Mitty can imagine he can do.