The Gazette has joined the company of the giants of American industry. We have cracked the China market ... well, sort of.
We’ll give you the details in a minute, but first, a history lesson.
Back in the days of William Allen White and for some years after his death, The Gazette had a subscriber list that didn’t look at all like the list for a small-town newspaper. Of course, the paper plopped onto Emporia porches and smacked screen doors six days a week like clockwork, carrying news of the town and the world. But that wasn’t the end of the newspaper’s reach.
Every day, back in the distribution department, dozens more papers were rolled up for mailing. Some of them went to former Emporians exiled to other cities or states and eager to keep up on the news of home. But other papers regularly went to people who had never seen Emporia, but wanted to know what The Gazette was saying and what its readers were thinking. Every day, those copies of the paper would land on the desks of movers and shakers in Washington, New York, Chicago and places even farther away.
Oh, those were the good old days!
But with the growth of national and international news sources and the rising cost of postage, the wider interest in Emporia’s doings began to wane. Mail subscriptions dwindled and The Gazette’s audience shrank back to the local folks.
The Internet has opened up the world again for The Gazette. Every day, people from Russia, Africa and Australia are logging in.
Here’s the China story:
On Dec. 26, The Gazette published a report that one of the local effects of the recession was a steep fall in prices paid for recyclable materials — the glass, paper, cardboard and plastic that people drop off at the recycling center to keep them out of the city’s trash stream. One of the people quoted in the report was Keith Senn, the city’s sanitation supervisor.
At work, a couple of days later, Senn got a phone call from China. The call was from an American working in China — Senn didn’t catch his name — who wanted to know if Emporia could use some help getting rid of its recyclables.
No, thank you, Senn told him. The city already has a contract with a company that handles all of that.
And that was that.
Obviously, the caller had seen The Gazette report — or a reference to it — on the Internet and decided it was worth a phone call to see if there was any profit in the situation for him.
That’s the way the world is doing business these days, and The Gazette is proud to be part of it.
Patrick S. Kelley
Editorial Page Editor