Beachcombing

These past few months have been hectic since the passing of my wife in March, but things are starting to get back to normal. There are fewer tearful moments but a huge void still exists when someone you’ve been living with for 53 years is gone. Soon you learn to appreciate the many things they achieved in their lifetime. Anita was an amazing partner, mother, grandmother, relative to many and friend to everyone who knew her.

Lately I’ve grown to appreciate her financial savvy by tucking away money for a rainy day. Perhaps watching financial advisor Suze Orman on television was the motivation, but I doubt that saving receipts from 30 years ago was part of that advice. Only four more boxes to go!

We’ve already given away 40 boxes of yarn that consumed a lot of our closet and storage space. Now we’re down to a dozen or so boxes of baby blankets, baby sweaters, afghans and Christmas stockings that were often sold at the Sugar Plum craft shows.

When Anita retired from the LBPD Homicide Department in 2013 she had lots of time to produce those items, but that came to a screeching halt a few years later with declining vision, due to diabetic retinopathy. Soon she could not drive her car and then the knitting became too much of a chore.

There’s an advertisement on page two offering the baby products at whatever price she put on those items for the craft shows. Any revenue collected will be put into a legacy fund to honor her memory for many years to come.

I still get a chuckle out of some of those non-profit organizations that sent her thousands of return address labels, hundreds of greeting cards, dozens of calendars and note pads, etc. The St. Joseph’s Indian School in South Dakota must have spent $100 on postage, printing, “Dreamcatchers” and other gift items following one $25 contribution.

The shift to the use of social media has not only resulted in a decline in newspaper advertising revenues, but also a trend to communicate poorly. Lately we’ve been receiving emailed fliers regarding upcoming events, which are quickly deleted.

Media folks are lazy. If you want to see publicity about your upcoming special event it must be in press release format.

A press release is a document that contains sentences and paragraphs written in a style similar to what you read in the newspaper. It is submitted as text, either in the body of an email and/or as a separate Microsoft Word attachment.

Photographs with their captions are submitted as attachments as well. The preferred format is JPEG between 100KB and 500KB. Identify persons in the photo from left to right.

A press release is:

• News that is local, timely, impactful, celebrity or unique.
• Answers the following: What, Who, When, Where, Why and How?
• Written objectively in the third person; avoid I, my, we, our, etc.
• Includes a website and/or phone number to call for more details.
• Uses URLs on a limited basis and DOES NOT INCLUDE HYPERLINKS. (Where do you click on a newspaper page, dummy?)
• NO ALL CAPS, no underlines, no italics, no color, no bolding and no exclamation marks!

A press release is not:

• Puff verbiage like “fantastic, delicious, beautiful, outstanding, sensational” and similar subjective BS
• Submitted in outline or as bullet points
• An Acrobat PDF file that prohibits swiping/pasting the text for editing purposes
• An attachment that’s a flier, poster or digital advertisement that requires re-writing
• A link to your website containing any of the above that requires re-writing
• Excessively long with numerous quotations versus factual details.

We’ll run items on a space available basis if emailed at least two weeks in advance to editor@beachcomber.news or, if a calendar item, calendar@beachcomber.news.

Contact advertising@beachcomber.news if you want your flier, poster or digital advertisement to run as paid advertising space.

Don’t know how to follow the above guidelines? For an outrageous fee, we’ll write your press release suitable for sharing with other news media.

publisher@beachcomber.news