Book donation completed

by: Lois Allen

We reached out to our readers and asked for financial help to keep our history in book form by contributing to the binding of The Cedar Springs Post Newspaper for the years, 2016 and 2017. Thankfully, our readers responded.

We now have enough money to make it happen. Our thanks and appreciation go out to those donors including Nancy Nielsen, our very first donor, as well as Dan and Donna Clark, Kim Gillow and Mary Balon, Sally Thompson and one anonymous.

We will have a dedication page in these books to honor their contribution with their names to be seen and appreciated for years to come.

Thank you!

By Lois Allen, Publisher

We are currently celebrating 30 years of local coverage. It’s a celebration because when I took over operations in 1988, I didn’t think we could make it a whole year! We are still here because of the local businesses that support us with their advertising. We thank them.

The local paper is an insight into the people and the place we call Cedar Springs. Not only that, it is an ongoing historical documentary printed weekly.

You grab a Post on your way into Meijers, or maybe at one of our 80 plus newsstands from here to Greenville and up into Howard City. Sometimes you might save a copy when you see your child’s name or picture, or maybe you have a Hometown Hero that you are proud of and so you cut out the feature and place them in your family scrapbook. 

In the business of newspapering we like to call that the “refrigerator effect” meaning people will cut out portions of the newspaper and put it on their fridge. The highest compliment we can get.

We don’t have The Post in the “cloud.” The cloud costs money and you must pay to access it. With newspapers (including ours) struggling to stay solvent and pay the bills in this age when advertisers flock to the internet, Facebook and direct mail, among about a thousand other adverting venues, we are lucky to still be here!

But when we are gone, we want to ensure the history we’ve documented will not be lost. So, each year we send the printed pages for each issue to a bookbindery where they compile them into a hard cover book. We have two books for each year. One for our office to use as a reference and the other is donated to the Cedar Springs Historical Society. This way, if one of these buildings burns down, (Lord forbid!) there will still be a historical record of our people here.

However, The Post, in its effort to stay afloat, has not had the additional funds to pay the cost for this. We currently have two years of unbound newspapers. In 2015, the Gunnells of Cedar Springs generously donated the funds to pay the cost for those books. 

The Post is currently hoping that we can find a community member, or members willing to help us out so we can bind the past two years (2016 & 2017).

The cost for the “publishing” or binding of these two years, which is four books, is approximately $500.

You may contact us Monday through Thursdays between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m. and on Friday 10 a.m. until 2 p.m. or email us at classifieds@cedarspringspost.com or at sales@cedarspringspost.com. Our phone number is (616) 696-3655.

Thanks for reading The Cedar Springs Post!

They say the best things in life are free. A sunny day, a child’s smile, the smell of leaves burning in the fall, kittens and also The Cedar Springs Post are a few.

However, many things free are actually paid by and with advertising. Television programming, radio, junk mail, brochures, flyers, and much more are free to us but have a cost to produce.

The Cedar Springs Post is one of those things. Free to the public, it survives on advertisers who say, “Yes, we want to keep the local paper here in Cedar Springs.”

Without them, The Post would not exist. With so many advertising choices available, I am grateful there are still businesses that say “yes.” Their advertising dollars pay our bills and the cost of production and printing.

Their advertising also helps to bring the community of Cedar Springs together with pride in our children, our accomplishments and provide a service that is invaluable to the people who live here… for free.

But there is no guarantee that it will always be so. It’s totally a business decision… an advertising choice.

I truly believe The Post is the greatest little paper I’ve seen. And with just a small staff of five! For nearly 30 years we’ve never missed an issue.

We thank our advertisers for their participation in free community news and for their checks that help make it happen. Thank you!

This week, for Veteran’s Day, we recognize and honor our service men and women. The Cedar Springs Post has compiled, printed and published the faces and names of our local veterans to publically recognize their service to our country and commitment to our freedom by putting their lives on the line to do so. Thank you to each of you!

This was made possible by our area businesses on those pages. Our advertisers are the best! We recognize them as heroes as well.

Thank you all for your support,
Lois Allen, Publisher of The Cedar Springs Post

Hug a Veteran today!