The cover of the Sheboygan Press 107th Anniversary edition

The week before Christmas, the Sheboygan Press, one of the papers I edit, celebrated its 107th anniversary. Our business might be news, but our readers also love history. We run a weekly column from the head of the country historical society, and it’s really popular.

Seven years ago, for our centennial, we ran an anniversary edition and included a replica of our very first edition. For this edition, we decided to celebrate our birthday with a vintage styled newspaper with stories from throughout the decades.

As a new editor and a newcomer, it was a great way to learn about the history of the city and of the newspaper. I learned about Charles Broughton, who led the newspaper to become “one of the most influential, liberal papers in the state”. The graphic on the front page trumpeted many of his and the newspaper’s campaigns and accomplishments including the preservation of local wetlands.

Broughton was also a fierce anti-Prohibitionist, and on the front page of the commemorative edition, I included an editorial I assume he penned railing away against the Anti-Saloon League, which branded the Sheboygan Press a “bootleg newspaper”.

It was fascinating looking through our bound archives to see the features we had. Our paper used to have a society editor who chronicled just about everything when it came to the who’s who of Sheboygan. The society editor chronicled local teas, travel and social events. It’s odd that in this age of social media when we reveal just about everything to friends real and virtual that I find it a slightly creepy invasion of privacy to have this level of detail about the local goings on. Discuss.

In our first edition, the publishers ran an announcement of their intentions in launching the paper, and to be honest, there wasn’t much that I would change. They wrote:

IN PRESENTING this the first issue of the SHEBOYGAN DAILY PRESS, the publishers do so with a sense of deep responsibility mingled with feelings of pride that Sheboygan has now a daily morning paper and one that will represent the people and all classes of people.

…It is a hard matter to please everybody, and it would be foolish and futile for us to attempt to do that.

…Sensational stories and fake news will be given a wide berth. We realize that our city is a growing one and its interests will always receive our first thought. Anything that tends to advance Sheboygan and put it in the front rank will always have our cordial support. Of course there may be times when certain public affairs will demand attention and notice and when it may be difficult for us to take an impartial stand, but if such an emergency arises, as it surely will, the influence of the SHEBOYGAN DAILY PRESS will always be for what we consider the right.

When my news editor and I first came up with the idea, I felt like it was definitely one of the crazier things that we had come up with since I started. But I went to our ad director who let me know about the replica edition we had created for our centennial. The ad team embraced the idea. Actually, they didn’t just embrace it, they didn’t just run with it. They bloody well sprinted away with it. Initially, we were only going to run with four pages, but our advertisers loved the idea so much, they sold almost three pages of ads in a day. We added two more pages to the section. It’s a very nice thing to be adding pages to a mid-week edition because we have so much ad support.

We promoted the project on Facebook and even paid to ‘boost’ our posts to reach people beyond our normal audience. One post has 203 likes, which is pretty good going for a local newspaper.

I had a lot of fun putting the edition together, and I think that showed through with the edition. Our readers loved it and responded to it, and our advertisers really loved it too. What more could I ask for? We need to surprise, amuse and engage our readers more like this. It ended the year on a high note, and I am looking to carry that momentum into the new year. Happy 2015!