A Senior Perspective wish list

By Jim Palmer

When I was young, now was the time of the year when I would start making up Christmas lists for Santa, parents, grandparents, and any other relative who was willing to send little Jimmy some Christmas joy.

This year, I have made up a wish list for Senior Perspective. Now and then we have people ask us what they can do to support us... so why not make up a list. There are some specific asks in here and some more general ones, but they are all things we would love over the holiday season (and beyond). 

Here it goes...

Story Ideas

We take pride in our feature articles and we could not find most of the great stories without the help of our readers. Do you know someone who would be a good person, couple, or group of people to feature in an upcoming edition of our paper?

We are always looking for stories and are always looking for that perfect story. In general, we are looking for stories that shine a light on people who are doing something or have done something unique in their life. People who have remained active, are spreading joy in their community, or are in some way an inspiration. Stories can be inspiring, thought-provoking, historical, etc. General feature stories can not be political or promotional of a business or events. We do have “business profile” stories in the paper that promote businesses, but these are paid options and businesses should contact our ad reps for more information on those. If you have been a long-time reader, you have an idea of what stories appear in the Senior Perspective, but if you aren’t sure -- be sure to ask. Some of the best stories are the ones that may seem a little (or a lot) outside the box.

If you have a good story idea, send it over. I usually can tell you right away if it will be a good fit for our paper. My contact info is at the end of this column. 

Submit a story

Stories are not just written by our writers. We also publish many submissions from our readers throughout the year.

If you are interested in submitting a story, the best submissions are stories written in first person about something unique that happened in your life. Maybe it is a fun experience when you were young or maybe it is a life-changing moment in your life that happened earlier this year. Whatever you decide to write on, be sure to include a lot of details and try not to get too wordy.  The shorter they are, the better chance they will fit in the paper. Also, don’t worry too much about spelling and grammar. We can take care of those changes on our end. Stories can be sent directly to me for review.

Share the paper

Just about every month I get a note from someone who says they discovered the paper for the first time. Many are people who recently moved into our distribution area. If you know someone who is new to your neighborhood or community, share a paper with them and tell them about Senior Perspective. It is a simple act, but one that really helps us out. Keeping our readership high is an important ingredient in our success.

Tell a Decision Maker

Perhaps the biggest impact you can make to help Senior Perspective is telling a decision maker at a business or organization about the power of Senior Perspective. This could include owners, managers, ad managers, or anyone who makes decisions on advertising. Because of the  wide distribution and readership of this paper, we have helped several hundred businesses and organizations grow over the years. Advertising is a very important part of a free publication like ours so we want to make sure that stays strong. What should you say? Just tell them your honest opinion on the newspaper and how often you and your friends read the paper. That should do it. Your words can be very powerful. 

Writers Wanted

We have a few areas in our distribution that do not have a feature writer (and we wish we had one). If you have an interest in writing feature stories (about other people) and you live in or near the following areas, I would love to talk to you about potentially writing for Senior Perspective: Wadena, Bemidji, Little Falls, Elk River, Mankato, New Ulm, Detroit Lakes, and Fargo/Moorhead. When we learn about stories in these areas, we have our writers travel and would love to have writers closer to these communities. Writers can write as little or as much as they want... so no pressure. Contact me for more details if you are interested in learning more.

Driver Wanted

We have a delivery driver position in the Little Falls/Brainerd area that is currently open.  This is a one day a month paid delivery job. For more info, call or email me.

Contact Info

To reach me to talk about any of these, just email me at jim@srperspective.com, call 320-334-3344, or write to Senior Perspective, Attn: Jim, PO Box 1, Glenwood, MN 56334.