By Mark Vinciguerra
Capital Region Independent Media
It is an obligation for town leadership to provide the most cost-effective services for taxpayers as possible, but that is not happening in the town of Coeymans when it comes to publicizing town and zoning/planning board meetings.
Rather, taxpayers are paying steeper bills to reach fewer readers.
For decades, the Coeymans Town Council contracted with the Ravena News-Herald as the town’s “paper of record.” For the town, that meant running state-mandated legal advertising in the News-Herald, which has reported on the town’s goings-on for over a century. Those legal ads notify town and village residents when public hearings are scheduled and other town business on an as-needed basis.
At the start of 2023, under the leadership of the town council’s former administration, for the first time in many decades, the Times-Union, based in Loudonville, was named the town’s official paper of record. The current town administration in January of this year voted to continue using the Times-Union rather than the News-Herald, whose office is right in the heart of Main Street in the village of Ravena.
That decision makes little sense on a number of levels.
The Times-Union delivers 102 daily newspapers in the town of Coeymans, according to the company’s most recent filing with the Alliance for Audited Media. The Ravena News-Herald, a weekly newspaper, delivers six times that amount with well over 600 papers going to village and town residents each week.
And that doesn’t count the News-Herald’s digital reach — we have more than 3,500 social media followers and nearly 700 website visitors from the town each month.
By only running the town’s legal notices in the Times-Union, elected officials are leaving town residents in the dark about the key issues impacting their lives.
And not only are fewer local readers seeing town legal notices, taxpayers are also paying more money to reach fewer residents.
The News-Herald has been a hyperlocal publication for more than 100 years, focusing on the issues and events that are important to our neighbors. Our reporters are the ones covering the Friendship Festival each year, and veterans’ ceremonies on Memorial Day, and the annual Christmas parade down Main Street. Our reporters cover weekly sports — last week it was the RCS girls’ volleyball and soccer games, and the football team, not just when the teams are winning division titles, but every week.
We have also broadened our reach with videos and Facebook Live and Facebook reels — a recent reel featuring a local musician performing at Rail to River Brewing drew more than 10,000 views.
The News-Herald is deeply entrenched in the local community. The Ravena Coeymans Historical Society Museum has a permanent exhibit dedicated to the newspaper’s contributions and history in the local community, and we have started numerous programs locally for the public good — from honoring the community’s grassroots leaders with the annual Top 5 Changemakers’ Awards to the Feed Your Mind, Feed A Family program, which has provided Thanksgiving meals to thousands of local residents over the years.
The Ravena News-Herald provides local journalism covering the town and informing its citizens on issues that are important to them and their families. We have done it for more than a hundred years and continue to do so. It is incumbent on the town council to give residents the most bang for their buck and vote to once again make the News-Herald the official paper of record for the town it has spent a century serving.
We urge local residents to bring this issue to the town council and demand that they make the switch to support local journalism and save taxpayer dollars at the same time.
Mark Vinciguerra is the president and owner of Capital Region Independent Media, which publishes the Ravena News-Herald.
