From left: Lansing residents Matthew J. Splant and Melanie Jongsma have teamed up with Shopper owner Arlo Kallemeyn to form The Lansing Journal.
Missing The Shopper? Meet The Lansing Journal
Contributed By:The 411 News
Every community deserves a good newspaper
Its name says it all. The Shopper is the go-to-guide for residents along the Indiana and Illinois border. Pages of advertising, from cover to cover, cater to shoppers wanting to buy, sell or swap everything from autos to xylophones.
The free newspaper is also a bible for small business advertisers, letting them get messages out about their services at low costs that fit their budgets.
Instead of The Shopper with a front page advertisement, Lansing newsstand patrons and print subscribers found The Lansing Journal.
“This will be an exciting change for my advertisers who have been so used to the weekly Shopper,” said Arlo Kallemeyn, the paper’s owner and publisher. “The Shopper has been serving South Holland and surrounding communities for more than 60 years, ever since my father started it. But we’re flexible enough to make some changes in order to keep serving the community.”
The change started in conversations with Melanie Jongsma and Matthew J. Splant, Lansing residents who were planning to start up a weekly newspaper. Jongsma referred to a March 2017 email from a Northwest Indiana Times editor that said, “We have reduced coverage in Illinois significantly. Due to resources and limited space in print, [we’re] keeping stories generally to larger issues.” This email might be considered the triggering event behind the launch of The Lansing Journal.
“We have so much going on in our community,” says Jongsma. “And I know people are interested in this news, even though the larger papers aren’t able to cover it. I wanted to find a way to meet that need.” When Kallemeyn offered to transform the Lansing edition of his paper into a print version of The Lansing Journal, the project picked up speed.
The Lansing Journal is also hoping to attract and develop local writing talent. “We will provide guidance as to our values and philosophy of journalism,” says Jongsma, “and we’re willing to train younger writers. Every writer gets a byline, so we want to make sure every story is one that someone is proud to put his or her name on.”
Jongsma wants to do more than pay lip service to the diverse demographic make-up of her village. “We want to let people know,” she says, “that The Lansing Journal is a newspaper for all of Lansing. Not only do we want to cover diverse stories in Lansing, we actually want diverse people to participate with us in providing news, photos, and story ideas. We are eager to keep learning and exploring new ways of gathering and sharing information, so Lansing residents can have the newspaper our community deserves.”
The Shopper hasn’t disappeared. Once a month and in its Lansing edition only, The Shopper will be replaced by The Lansing Journal.
The journal can also be found online at http://thelansingjournal.com
Story Posted:09/16/2017
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