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Johnson Hands Off Bulletin, Looks Forward to Next Chapter As Told to Marjorie Turner Hollman, for Stories with Seniors Grant

“This program is supported in part by a grant from the Bellingham cultural council, a local agency which is supported by the Mass Cultural Council, a state agency.”
TechPro Publications and the Bellingham Bulletin
I started out doing tech writing as well as design and pre-press work for local printers. TechPro Publications was my original business. I had picked up a couple tech writing jobs, but they were really difficult to find. And sometimes I didn’t get paid for a long time. 
By the same token, the printers had started using desktop computers by then, so they were doing a lot of their own pre-press work in house. With that part of my business dropping off, I needed to do something else, so I took a job with the local daily newspaper as a correspondent. 
As I was running around Bellingham covering events for the Milford Daily News, I kept hearing the same thing over and over again from residents. They were dissatisfied because they felt that only the bad news about Bellingham ever got into the paper. It was all negative headlines, rarely anything good.
At the time, other than the Milford paper or the Woonsocket Call, Bellingham residents received the Country Gazette. I thought it was a cute paper, but like the Milford newspaper, it was not focused strictly on Bellingham. It covered something like nine towns. I knew who the owner of the Blackstone newspaper was (a friend of a friend) so my friend connected us and I talked with her about my idea of starting a paper in Bellingham. She thought it was a good idea, and said, “What do you have to lose? If you do it for a couple months and it doesn’t work out, oh well, you just don’t do it anymore.” She also pointed out that I had a lot more to work with than she did. “Bellingham has a lot more businesses than Blackstone does, so give it time.” And that’s what I did.
I didn’t know what to call the newspaper. I wanted something that wasn’t close to another publication’s name. My husband Michael came up with the name Bellingham Bulletin. I liked the alliteration; it worked. 
That first issue was twelve pages. This was 1994, the year the town celebrated its 275th anniversary. The very same weekend they had the anniversary ball and a reception at the town hall, the first edition of the Bellingham Bulletin came out, just in time for these events. I was off and running, no looking back.
That was the beginning, and for quite a while I was doing everything. I’d begun learning graphic design, so I wasn’t a complete novice when I started TechPro and then the Bulletin. I had set up a few accounts, and as far as managing a newspaper, it was learn as you go. Over the course of the years, we went up as high as forty pages. 
Today, the whole newspaper industry is changing. Technology has evolved so much! When I first started the Bulletin, I had to use a waxer to paste each individual component on the large page. Then I got a printer that would print 11 x  17 size, eliminating the time-consuming paste-up. Then I had to drive the pages to the printer’s. One time I grabbed the box that had all the sheets in it, drove all the way to Seekonk, and when I got there the box was empty. One side of the box was ripped and the pages had slid right out when I picked it up. They were laying all over the stairs when I came back home, so I had to drive all the way back again to Seekonk with the pages! Now, PDF files are uploaded electronically to the printer’s site, then printed and delivered to the post office. This was a game-changer.
One of my writers, Marjorie Turner Hollman, knew I was looking for an editor and introduced me to Florence Ames.  I remember questioning if it would be worth hiring her then because she was already 72; how long would I have her?  It was the best decision I ever made. When I sold the paper twenty years later, she was turning 92, and had edited and proofread right up to the very last issue I produced.

At one point, someone said to my editor, Florence: “I like that paper, but there are so many ads,” to which she responded, “Do you pay for that paper?” His answer was “no.”
 “That’s because of those ads. That’s what pays for the newspaper.” He just hadn’t thought about it that way. Part of my goal was to provide low-cost advertising for businesses, and also to help families manage their lives here in the town. 
Because I had a small window of time to put the entire paper together, I could never make any plans for between the 15th and the 23rd of every month. Selling the Bulletin has closed one chapter of my life and opened another. I feel a sense of freedom that I haven’t felt in a very long time. I’m looking forward to this next chapter.
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