It’s true, as this newspaper has been exhorting for years, that for the City of Falls Church’s noble efforts at economic development to be sustained, a concerted effort to draw in revenue from populations beyond its borders is required. There is no evidence that anybody at City Hall has gotten this message, beyond lip service. The move by the City’s leading restaurant owners to call a meeting last month to sound an alarm about the consequences of a failure by the City to seriously market what the City now has needs to be taken very seriously.
It is not surprising that City Hall doesn’t understand or appreciate marketing. Over this newspaper’s three dozen years, we’ve found that few people, even business people, do. It gets treated as an afterthought. Small businesses, in particular, say they can’t afford to advertise, but they don’t appreciate how important it is to draw customers. If you opened a business, you wouldn’t fail to put a sign up on your door to identify your business, would you? Well, advertising is just a way of doing just that, but a bigger sign for a wider audience.
These days, businesses are thinking they can achieve that result from social media on the Internet. But unless a great deal is spent to hire professionals who know how to saturate that medium, its effect is limited. We hate to repeat our own mantra, about how fortunate Falls Church is to have a respected community weekly that offers affordable rates for its advertisers to reach a targeted local market.
We have made the pitch repeatedly, including in a meeting with the mayor and vice-mayor, that this newspaper is ideally situated to expand its distribution to saturate the five zip codes that constitute “Greater Falls Church” where, according to the George Mason University’s Center for Regional Analysis, some $5 billion in annual disposable income sits. The area is populated by people who have Falls Church postal addresses, even if they don’t live right in the City of Falls Church. And they don’t know what’s here.
Between restoring free home delivery of the News-Press to all households in the City, and widening the distribution reach of the paper to cover the five Falls Church postal zones, we think the latter would actually serve the community more, because it would enlighten a wider audience to the benefits of all that Falls Church has to offer visitors.
A good, engaging print newspaper made readily available to a wider population needs nothing more than someone to pick it up, and to read it over time. Not controlled by online algorithms, they are of primary value to its advertisers.
As one of the only remaining newspapers in this entire region that still prints each week, the News-Press remains an accessible vehicle for widening Falls Church’s range of influence beyond her borders on a regular and sustainable basis.