If you’ve been a loyal reader of Newtown Square Friends & Neighbors since our August 2018 issue surprised you in your mail, then the mission of our hometown magazine is being fulfilled, and the reason our mission is also our magazine motto: Bringing People Together. It happens while reading and usually experiencing only one or two degrees of social separation between yourself and nearly everything read on nearly every page of any new issue of Newtown Square’s monthly hometown magazine. We call it social-media-in-print.
Ever since a printing press could publish a hometown newspaper, farther back than even the founding of our country (which includes our Newtown Township, founded in 1682), printed newspapers were published media, with the mission to inform readers of recent or coming events and items of interest about local issues, people and places. That mission was and is the same in any print publication: to inform, for social lifestyle benefit, awareness and pride of community.
With that historical consideration, our description of this magazine’s brand of local publishing as social-media-in-print, is not then some new kind of commodity delivered into a community, although it might suggest the old has become new again. For the past 30 years and more, the fast paced growth and acceptance of what is summarized as “social media,” available to anyone with internet access, has redefined what it means to be connected. The internet allows us to connect with information, people and places all over our planet for our business and social benefit, but now within the global commerce and social community.
The benefits of digitally published information, some with two-way communication, is the new way of life. Certainly so if business or social satisfaction, or two-way communication, is needed on a global, national or regional scale. But not as much locally? People still desire to walk locally when they could ride. Why? Because within the hierarchy of human needs is the need to feel connected within a human community. And we know the most real human connectedness does not come to us digitally, or event in print. But they do come to us by living in a real community with other humans, some we’ve interacted with in our local community for years. Others we know only to see around our local community. And many who we would like to come to know, simply because they live among us in the same real community because as humans, we seek to feel socially connected to the community in which we live.
Social-media-in-print was nearly lost in our Newtown Square community. But after five years, and 60 monthly issues, Newtown Square Friends & Neighbors magazine has again arrived in your mail, without cost, to serve you and our Bringing People Together mission, thanks to the hometown Sponsors you see advertising on the pages of your hometown magazine. Our Sponsors of Newtown Square residents are the business owners who have agreed to use a portion of their limited marketing budgets to fund the cost of our hometown magazine by placing their business advertising on our pages. They do so not just to advertise their business, but also because they believe our Bringing People Together mission is a good thing for residents of Newtown Square who they recognize are important to the success of their local business.
As I write this month’s Bringing People Together feature for our 5th Anniversary issue of Newtown Square Friends & Neighbors in print and online at www.NewtownSquareMag.com, I’m also mindful that today my wife Jean and I are celebrating our 29th Wedding Anniversary, and the same number of years living in Newtown Square. With similar pride and passion for what is so very important to me, thank you for your loyal readership of our hometown magazine throughout our first five years of publication, and for your support of our advertising Sponsors who make it all possible.
In gratitude for the demonstrated loyalty of our hometown Sponsors, who make our hometown magazine possible, please join me in returning our Newtown Square resident loyalties to our advertising Sponsors whenever possible, by always choosing to give our business to them first. And on behalf of our advertising Sponsors and magazine staff, thank you for your loyalty to our social-media-in-print hometown magazine and the Bringing People Together mission of Newtown Square Friends & Neighbors for the past five years.