My siblings and I grew up in a family in which our parents, Chris and Ruth Mitsoff, owned and operated a community newspaper in Beavercreek, Ohio. It began as the Beavercreek News, a weekly newspaper, in 1960, and then became the Beavercreek Daily News in the 1970s.
Dad and Mom were always very proud of the part they played in helping an unincorporated, primarily farming and agricultural township of less than 10,000 people stave off efforts of surrounding communities to annex large sections of the township. They believed that the local newspaper was the communication vehicle that was needed to let people know what issues they faced.
In the early 1980s, the newspaper industry was already realizing some of the declines which would become exacerbated in this century with the advent of the Internet and people developing habits of getting their news online. In 1986, my parents sold their daily newspaper to a company that was purchasing other community newspapers in the Dayton, Ohio area. It didn’t take long to realize that the new owners really didn’t have a clue about how to successfully publish a community newspaper. As the editor of the Beavercreek Daily News under the new ownership, I had about as close of a view as is possible of the effects of the poor decisions they made — too numerous to list here.
My sister Christine, who had sold advertising for the paper while still under our parents’ ownership, did a project as part of her business degree from Wright State University — a proposal to start a new weekly newspaper in Beavercreek. Her professor told her that the business plan had true potential, and that she should consider it.
Long story short, she recruited her brother (yours truly) who had years of experience as the editor of a Beavercreek newspaper to join her, and we started the Beavercreek Current to compete against the newspaper which our parents had started but was under new ownership.
The content principles were a combination of something old and something new. The old concept: News only about Beavercreek. That was our niche. Also, we returned to the tabloid format which the community had become accustomed to under our parents’ ownership. The something new was an attempt at focusing on the power of imagery. The front page image above more closely resembles a magazine than what would have been expected of a newspaper in 1991.
In each edition, we planned coverage of local government, local schools, local businesses, local arts and leisure and local sports.
We started distributing the paper for free in late 1988 to the vast majority of households in Beavercreek. It’s a common strategy for businesses to give away a new product for a period of time in hopes that the audience will like it and ultimately want to buy it. A few months later, the Wednesday primarily-news product transitioned to delivery to paid subscribers only. We added a free-delivery “Weekend Wrapup” product that was delivered Saturdays to the vast majority of households in Beavercreek. That product consisted primarily of paid advertisements, including grocery circulars, which subsidized the costs of production and delivery. In the industry, it is known as a TMC (total market coverage) product. We used Friday night football and basketball game stories as the primary news “hook” to get people in the habit of picking it up and reading it over the weekend.
Tom Mitsoff and Christine Mitsoff (co-owner, publisher and my sister)
We rented our office space from a Beavercreek dentist with whom we shared the building. We didn’t have the space nor the finances to install a full newspaper production facility there. So we were one of the first newspapers in Ohio in 1988 to use computer pagination to produce the newspaper pages. We leased Apple Macintosh computers (the ones you may remember that were cube-shaped) for use at all of our workstations and wired the office so they were all connected. When production for each edition was completed, we drove the finished pages to the facility where we contracted for printing. Digital transfer of documents wasn’t yet a thing at that time.
Christine and I learned some very hard lessons about the economic realities of the publishing business and of business in general. We kept the business going for four years, but it was never easy. In 1992, we had an offer from Amos Press of Sidney, Ohio to purchase the Beavercreek Current. Amos Press was at that time publishing the suburban Dayton, Ohio group of newspapers and one or two ownership groups removed from the company that purchased from our parents. I was very flattered that one of their terms was that I would move to their daily Beavercreek publication as the editor. After several months of negotiations, we came to a deal, and back I went into the editor’s seat of the Beavercreek Daily News. Except, because the Current had a significant market share in the community, the new name became the Beavercreek News-Current.
The Beavercreek Current was a fantastic, eye-opening experience for a couple of young entrepreneurs.
Beavercreek Current staff, circa 1991
