There is no software to learn and nothing to install. Every month we send you one finished story and the advertisement. You add your rescue story and the photograph, and the page is done.
Here is the whole arrangement: your rescue story goes on the left, the photograph in the center, and the story we send you on the right — or lay it out however you want; it is your page. Two things are fixed: the story we send, and the Mars advertisement across the bottom. Everything else is yours to move.
By Dana PriestPiedmont Journalism Foundation
The thing about a blind dog is that he does not know he is a blind dog. He knows the shape of a room, the sound of a bowl, the particular tread of the person who is coming to get him.
Tanner learned all three in the eleven weeks he spent at the Middleburg Humane Foundation, and then he learned a new set, in a new house, with a sighted husky to follow and five cats to negotiate.
He arrived on a Tuesday in a crate that was slightly too small, from a county two hours south, with a note attached that gave only his approximate age and the word “gentle.” The note was correct on both counts.
What the note did not say, because nobody knew it yet, was how he would handle a house. Blind dogs map rooms the way the rest of us map a dark hallway at night — by memory, by touch, and by an accumulating confidence that the furniture has not moved since yesterday.
The cats, for their part, worked it out in under a week, which is roughly six days longer than they would like it recorded.
Read more here.
By Leland SchwartzEditor, The Middleburg Page
When we heard that the candy and pet food company — which makes Milky Ways and Mars bars for us, IAMS and Pedigree for our dogs and Temptations for our cats — wanted to make everyone aware of how local it was, we thought ‘what better way than through the local press?’
So we asked the company if it would run a year-long test to see if us local news editors could share their message wide enough to be a serious complement to their own social media efforts.
Can local news organizations help drive national brands and recapture a piece of what kept community newspapers alive for decades? That is the question. If this is the first you’ve heard of the Mars “Closer Than You Think” campaign, then we’re onto something.
What we’re thinking is to bring you two sets of stories over the year juxtaposed to Mars’ own messages. The first about rescues; how they work and how you can help, through our colleagues at the Middleburg Humane Foundation. The second describing how Mars is a thought leader in responsible pet ownership and animal adoption as well as how it makes its petfood and the science behind it.
Read more here.
How it works, in one paragraph. Each month we email you the right-hand story and the strip advertisement. You add your rescue story and photograph — in this arrangement, or any layout your paper prefers — sell the eight reader slots, and print at your own trim. Send us the story and the photograph back, and we return a finished vertical video for your social accounts. The rates and the full arrangement are in the partner kit.