I’m sure many of you feel as I do that the years seem to go by faster as we get older. My theory is that when we’re young, we want to be older so that we can do more things and be more independent, but as we age, the prospects down the road aren’t as exciting.
Pondering on this made me also consider the newspaper’s yearly cycle, and how that affects my sense of time. You might think that the paper’s rhythm beats to the weekly publication cycle, and it does. But there are other regular variations that occur through the year that affect the paper and our staff.
Like much of the area, we’re affected by the school year. Summer is a slower time, with less news from the colleges and public schools, much less sports to cover, and a generally slower pace. Come mid-August, and the tempo picks up into the fall and accelerates toward the holiday season. After New Year’s, like many local businesses, we typically have a lull, especially in advertising. Things pick up in March, and peak in May. Graduations and sports playoffs make May and into June a very busy time for us.
That seasonal routine used to define the paper’s year, but over the past five to eight years, we’ve added a number of other publications that we do, which makes our annual calendar composition more of a syncopation, with deadlines and publication dates scattered throughout the year. Many of these are not included in the newspaper and some aren’t even circulated locally, so most of our local readers are unaware of them.
Every month, we produce the Valley of Virginia Properties magazine, which is inserted in the first issue of The News-Gazette each month. The magazine is also provided to local realty offices and is in pickup boxes around the area.
Late January we publish Aging In Augusta, a guide for senior living in Augusta County. This is a project we do in partnership with the Greater Augusta Regional Chamber of Commerce, and it’s been very well received, to the point where we had to do a reprint of the January 2025 issue because the Chamber had distributed all copies by early summer.
In late January or early February, we publish our Healthy Living guide, which comes out in the paper and also is available in local medical offices and businesses.
March’s first issue sees the inclusion of RARO’s C.R.E.W. Playbook, a wellness guide that provides information on upcoming RARO programs as well as information on other community health, wellness and recreation organizations. C.R.E.W. stands for Community, Recreation, Education and Wellness. The C.R.E.W. Playbook is in the paper quarterly in March, June, September and December. RARO director Chad Coffey coordinates collecting all the information and our talented designer, Stephanie Blevins lays out the pages.
March is a busy month, with our Visiting Lexington and the Rockbridge Area Tourism and Travel Guide, distributed locally in hotels, B&B’s, the visitor center and other tourism venues, and in four of the Virginia State Welcome Centers on the interstates as you enter the state. We also publish the first of two biannual issues of This Augusta magazine, a combination chamber guide and community magazine, also done in partnership with the Augusta Chamber.
In April, we publish the Chamber of Commerce Serving Lexington, Buena Vista and Rockbridge County’s annual Community Guide and Chamber Directory. The guide benefits both the paper and the Chamber, with the Chamber getting a revenue share from the project.
One of our most popular features of the year is our annual high school senior section in May, with individual photos of all of the area’s graduating seniors, stories by our high school correspondents and information on commencement ceremonies.
Welcome Home, the Rockbridge Newcomers’ Guide comes out in August, in time for distribution to members of the entering classes at VMI, Washington and Lee and Southern Virginia. The Chamber and Main Street Lexington also distribute to newcomers and those inquiring about relocating.
The fall issue of This Augusta magazine publishes in mid-September.
Perhaps our biggest effort of the year is our Holiday Guide, with is combined with our mass mailing of the newspaper to virtually every address in the Rockbridge area. This project involves every department of the paper – advertising, news and circulation – to sell, produce, write and edit, update distribution data and actually deliver 19,000 copies of The News-Gazette to all 10 local post offices that we serve, all in time for delivery on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving.
This year, we added another project in partnership with our local chamber of commerce – an updated community map of Rockbridge County and our cities and towns. That will be available in a few weeks at the Chamber office. We’ll have some copies here at The News-Gazette, too.
Besides providing information and stories not found elsewhere, these publications help keep The News-Gazette solvent and viable, in the face of trend of declining regular newspaper advertising nationwide.
These publications are the work of our advertising and editorial staff, and freelance writers, photographers and advertising people here and in Augusta County. Besides our regular weekly deadlines, our production calendar has deadlines and publication dates throughout the year for these other publications, which may be why time for me and our staff seems to go so quickly these days.
