This Paper

Tulsa High Tech is a free, advertiser supported, tabloid newspaper which will be distributed throughout the greater Tulsa area, covering information of interest for the novice computer user, end users, small business owners, developers, IT Professionals, and other technology related groups. Many groups either send their newsletters only to members, have moved to online newsletters, or have dropped them altogether, because of cost, and this means few non-members know of their existence. We offer them a solution to this problem. We are offering to list meeting information and publish other information about a group in return for one or two of their members helping us take copies of the newspaper to businesses near where they live, work, or shop.

We identified over a dozen computer groups in the greater Tulsa area with web pages on the Internet, plus four amateur radio groups, and emailed each of them several times to see if they would be interested in working with Tulsa High Tech to publicize their groups activities, and we were very surprised that only two or three even responded to our emails, and we were not able to come up with enough support to get the paper going. I tried several other ways to try to come up with distributors of the paper, but none bore fruit.

This is my last attempt. I am printing a small paper using my own money, and I will be asking my friends to help me get this first issue out. If you see this, and would like for information about your group to be included, call Don Singleton at 622-3417 or email me at donsingleton@cox.net. If your group will provide me with one or two people that I can email once a month when a new issue has been printed, and if they will come to my house in East Tulsa and pick up 500 or 1000 copies of the paper, and take them to businesses near where they live, work, or shop, who are willing to have a stack of free papers on their counters for their customers to pick up, then I will not only list information about your group (when and where they meet, contact information, web site, etc.), but I will also include an article you write describing what happened at last month’s meeting, what will happen at next month’s meeting, etc. And on a space available basis I will consider running technical articles, product reviews, etc. from your members.

When the Tulsa Computer Society printed a free, advertiser supported, tabloid newspaper in the late ‘90s, we grew from about 100 to 150 members, to a group with 600 to 800 members for several years, before we had to discontinue the paper. We are too small to do that now, but with a dozen or more groups in the area, if just one or two people in each group are willing to help, we should be able to duplicate those results for all groups.

Are you interested?

If your group is interested in being included in Tulsa High Tech, please email donsingleton@cox.net and we will include you in the next issue. If I can get at least a half dozen groups willing to help, this will be the first of hopefully many, many issues. If not, well at least you can’t say I didn’t try. And as they say: “All You Can Do Is All You Can Do”.

Potential Advertisers: see the Rate Card on page 2. If you would like to be in the second issue, contact me now. I would like to get machine readable copy for ads, either a graphic file or a PDF, and I will need payment in advance. But you have my word that if I cannot come up with enough distributors to come out with another issue, any ad pre-payments will be refunded in full. The rate card on page 2 is based on 10,000 copies. If the publication is as successful as we expect it will be, the number of copies printed will increase, which will necessitate an increase in the ad rates; however any advertiser that is in our next issue or that joins us before we find we can justify a higher circulation, and that advertises in at least three issues a year, may use this rate card, regardless of how much our circulation, and hence costs, might grow.