BEAT
You can't congratulate what you never heard about.
You already care. Keeping up is the hard part.
A beat is the set of businesses a reporter covers. Beat covers yours.
What arrives
An edition, every week, under your masthead.
You name the businesses you have to stay current on. We read them — their own pages, the local press, the public record — and send back finished copy, dated, written to run. One place instead of forty tabs, and it is built around your list, not somebody's idea of your industry.
It goes out under your nameplate. Our name is not on it, the same way the wire service's name is not on the front page of your local daily. That is what this is: a wire service for one list instead of the world, which is why it can throw most of it away.
You publish what you want. You skip the rest. Nothing arrives that you did not ask to be covered.
The arithmetic
Count your list. Then count the minutes it takes to check one business properly — find the page, find the date, make sure it is your company and not a same-named one three states over. Multiply. Now do it again next week.
That is the number nobody on your staff has.
One communications director against several hundred member businesses is arithmetic, not a shortfall. Nobody could get to all of it. Beat does the reading so the desk can do the choosing.
We have not measured your hours and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Ask what an edition takes and the honest answer today is: we would want to build you one first and see if it is any good.
What we threw away
The product is the part we cut.
A week of reading turns up several times what ends up in print. An expansion runs. A new location runs. A fortieth anniversary runs. A Tuesday lunch special does not. Neither does anything we cannot date — if we cannot say when it happened, it is not an item. It goes in a hold pile with a note naming the one phone call that would fix it.
Every edition ships with an editor's note: what we read, what ran, what we held, what we cut, and why. When a week is quiet, it says so.
A wire that never has a slow week is not reading carefully.
What it looks like
Below is a full week's edition. It is invented — every business, every event, and every date on it. We are not going to put a customer's paper on our own website, and a made-up town is the honest way to show you the format. The layout, the standard, and the proportions are real: five items out of twenty-two candidates, from 540 businesses, in one week.
Click to enlarge and read.
Tell us your list
Send us the names. The member roster, the client book, the districts you cover — whatever list you already keep.
We'll read it for a week and build you a real edition off it — what ran, what we held and the call that would fix it, and what we cut and why. The same editor's note every edition carries.
The first one is free. Lists come in different sizes and shapes, so we price yours once we've seen it.
However it already exists. Paste it into an email, or attach the spreadsheet you already keep. Names are enough — a website next to each one saves us time.
A person writes back to confirm what we've got, ask whether you mean to publish this or keep it, and name the date your edition will land. Then we read. When it comes, publish it, cut it further, or bin it — it's yours either way.
Send us your listCall: 715-705-4121
Email: hello@preparetocatapult.com