Beacon Celebrates a Full Year of Publishing
Letter from the Publisher
This edition of the Beacon you have chosen to read commemorates one full year of publishing in Roswell and six months in Alpharetta and Milton. The business experts say if a start-up company can survive through the first year it has a chance at ultimately making it. Well, after one year of publishing the Beacon, the good news is we are still here!
Our survival through a very financially tough first year is due to you, our dedicated readers, and our very loyal advertisers. So let me say to all of you who are reading us today: Thanks for reading the Beacon. And to all of our advertisers who have supported us these past twelve months, thank you for your continued confidence and trust.
When my oh-so-patient wife Anne and I started this endeavor last January, we were called crazy by most people we shared our vision with, and we were shunned by the financial and investment community. So we decided to put our personal resources at risk to launch the Beacon. Call us stubborn or stupid, or maybe a combination of both, but I guess sometimes that is what is takes to get an idea like this off the ground with limited resources. We have been dramatically under-funded from the start, and our core decision to deliver the Beacon in the mailbox was seen as folly by most publishing insiders who reviewed our business plan. Sometimes you just have to do the right thing.
This first year has brought us great hope, greater challenges, some dramatic accomplishments and our share of stress, too. We have been truly blessed with the opportunity to meet many new friends in the cities we serve and, along the way, our love for our community has grown significantly. You can’t cover vibrant communities like Roswell, Alpharetta and Milton and not come away with a sense of purpose. The passion of our friends and neighbors is unsurpassed in any other locale we have lived or worked in.
We have been truly humbled this first year with the undying loyalty of our core executives, those who have been with us since day one, and who are now part of our family, like Daniel McElrath, Tim Altork, Jon Copsey and Karen Matthews, as well as many others who have made and continue to make significant contributions to the Beacon each week.
Our investors, most of whom approached us since we started, have provided us with critical operating capital at some of the most crucial times in our first year. We would not be here today without their support and belief in our mission.
So where are we today? We are not yet profitable, but we believe we are important. We believe we serve a purpose in our community. We believe in our cities. We believe in our readers and our advertisers. We believe in our cause. And so we go on.
We believe our voice is your voice, that our newspaper is your newspaper, and our undaunted determination is derived from your passion for our community.
If you value the Beacon and if we are a welcome addition to your home and family each week, we have one request. Please continue to show your support by patronizing our advertisers. If it makes sense for you, and if you need a product or service they offer, give them a try. Our advertisers are our sole source of revenue. They advertise with us because they, too, believe in you, our readers.
And don’t forget to tell them you saw it in the Beacon!