Home › The Local Journal › Print Is Dead?
The objection I hear most
Print Is Dead? Not in El Dorado Hills.
Print advertising isn’t dead. Mass-market print is. Newspapers and national magazines were built on renting a large, general audience to advertisers, and the internet does that job faster and cheaper, so that audience left. A private community magazine is a different product entirely. El Dorado Hills Neighbors is mailed to more than 5,400 affluent El Dorado Hills households every month, 89.4%+ of them read it, and the issue stays in the house until the next one shows up. That’s not the thing that died. That’s the opposite of it.
By Clinton Goodrich, owner and publisher. Published . About a 5 minute read.
Start with what’s true
Where “print is dead” is actually right.
The belief didn’t come from nowhere. People watched something real collapse. It’s worth being precise about what collapsed, because that’s the whole argument.
This part died
Mass-market print
The metro daily and the national magazine ran on one trade. Gather a large general audience, rent that audience to advertisers. Then the internet gathered a bigger audience, sold it by the click, and let you pick who saw you. The paper couldn’t match that on price, speed, or targeting. Circulation fell, ad pages followed, and it isn’t coming back. If someone says print is dead and they mean the newspaper, they’re right.
This part isn’t the same thing
A private community magazine
Almost none of that describes what arrives in an El Dorado Hills mailbox. It was never sold on a newsstand. It doesn’t chase a general audience, and it isn’t competing with your phone for the news. It goes to a specific list of homes, it’s written about the people in them, and it costs the household nothing. The thing that killed mass print, precise targeting, is what a mailed community magazine started with.
Two products, one word. That’s most of why this argument keeps going in circles.
Why the difference matters
A defined list of homes beats a general audience.
A newspaper sold you whoever happened to buy a paper that day. This is the reverse. The mailing list is the product, and it’s decided before a single page is written.
In El Dorado Hills that list is more than 5,400 affluent households. Not 5,400 impressions, and not 5,400 people who might live nearby. Actual addresses, receiving an actual issue, every month. Across Greater Sacramento our combined print reaches 25,000+ homes, so you can stay concentrated here or follow your customers into the communities around us.
If you sell something a homeowner buys, that list is the room you want to be standing in. It doesn’t need a bigger audience. It needs the right one.
Issue after issue, in the homes it’s written about.
The part nobody prices in
How long does a magazine actually last in the home?
A feed gets your ad about a second. That’s not a criticism, it’s the design. A feed is engineered to keep moving, and we buy a lot of it precisely because it delivers reach and frequency at scale.
The magazine does the other job. It gets carried in from the mailbox, and then it stays. On the counter, on the coffee table, in the bag headed to the pool. The same household picks it up, sets it down, and picks it up again, and your name is inside it the entire time. Nobody has to be retargeted to see you twice.
That’s the trade. Digital rents attention by the second. The magazine buys time in the house, plus the credibility of the publication your page is sitting inside.
Reach is only half of it. Getting opened is the other half, and that’s the number most advertising never gets to quote.
The reason it doesn’t hit the recycling
Why do people read a magazine that carries advertising?
Because it’s about them. That’s the entire mechanism, and there isn’t a clever second reason.
Their neighbors are in it. Their kids and their teams are in it. The schools, the fundraisers, the non-profits they already give to. And a lot of it is written by the residents themselves, along with the local businesses and non-profits partnered with the magazine. It isn’t a mailer that showed up uninvited. It’s the one piece of mail in the stack that has their community in it.
Which changes what your page is doing. You’re not interrupting something they wanted. You’re sitting next to it, in a publication they already trust, in front of a household that opened it on purpose. A stranger deciding who to trust with their house, their teeth, or their parents doesn’t make that call off a banner ad. They make it off a name they’ve been quietly seeing for months in a place that felt local and credible.
Read because it’s theirs, not because it was targeted well.
The honest part
How do you measure print if there’s no click?
Here’s where I’ll break ranks with most of my industry. Print doesn’t produce a number you can click. It never has. Anybody who hands you a clean cost per lead for a magazine ad is either guessing or selling you a story.
So we don’t invent one. We show you what can genuinely be shown, we say plainly what can’t, and you decide with the real picture in front of you.
| What owners ask | The straight answer | Can we show it? |
|---|---|---|
| How many homes get it? | 5,400+ affluent El Dorado Hills households, every issue | Shown |
| How many of them read it? | 89.4%+ readership | Shown |
| What will my page look like? | Your finished placement, designed and written for you, approved by you before it prints | Shown |
| Do businesses actually stay in it? | 76% of our partners renew | Shown |
| How many leads came from my printed page? | There’s no honest way to track it, so we don’t claim a number | Not claimed |
| What’s my cost per lead in print? | Same answer. If a competitor quotes you one, ask them exactly how it was tracked | Not claimed |
Scroll the table sideways to see every column.
Because the alternative is a made-up number, and you’d find out eventually. Renewal is the figure I’d watch if I were you. A business that couldn’t tell the placement was working would quietly stop paying for it, and 76% of ours don’t. That’s not a click, but it’s a real signal, and it’s an honest one. Where a channel can be measured properly, like digital, we report it to the impression. See the numbers our partners actually have.
What I’d actually do
Run both. They aren’t competing.
This was never print against digital. It’s two channels doing two different jobs, and buying one of them is why a lot of local marketing feels like it stalls.
Digital finds them
Social, display, video, and mobile served to the neighborhoods you want, between 30K and 280K impressions a month depending on your package. Measurable to the impression.
Print keeps you there
The same households, in their home, for the month, with your name beside the stories they opened the issue to read. No click, and no need for one.
The same family sees you twice
Once in the feed, once on the counter. That repetition across two very different contexts is what turns a name into a familiar one, and familiar is what gets called.
A partner’s full-page placement, designed and produced by us, running in homes we already reach. Categories are kept small on purpose, so dental, plumbing, landscaping, medical aesthetics, elder care, mental health and counseling, and HR staffing and recruiting are already spoken for here. Real estate, mortgage and lending, and insurance are open.
Straight answers
The questions I get after this one.
Is print advertising dead?
Mass-market print is in real decline. Newspapers and national magazines built their business on renting a large general audience to advertisers, and the internet did that job better. A private community magazine is a different product. It’s mailed to a defined list of homes, it’s about the people who live in them, and in El Dorado Hills it goes to more than 5,400 affluent households every month with 89.4%+ readership.
Why would anyone read a magazine that carries advertising?
Because it’s about them. Their neighbors, their kids, their teams, their schools, and the non-profits they already support. Much of it is written by residents and by the local businesses and non-profits partnered with it. People read it because it’s theirs, and that’s why 89.4%+ of the households it reaches open it.
Should I run print instead of digital advertising?
No. They do different jobs. Digital buys reach and frequency, and it’s measurable. The magazine buys time in the home and the credibility of the publication your page sits inside. Most of our partners run both, because reach without trust is expensive and trust without reach is slow. Here’s how the digital side works.
How do you measure print advertising if there’s no click?
You measure the inputs honestly and you stop there. We can show you exactly how many households are mailed, the readership figure, your finished placement before it prints, and how many partners renew, which is 76%. We won’t quote you a lead count or a cost per lead from a printed page, because there’s no honest way to track it.
Does my business have to be in El Dorado Hills?
No. What matters is whether your customers are here, not where your office sits. We work with owners across El Dorado Hills, Folsom, Granite Bay, Roseville, Rancho Murieta, Fair Oaks, Gold River, and the rest of Greater Sacramento. See what’s publishing and what’s expanding.
The next step
Decide it for yourself, with the real numbers.
Thirty minutes, owner to owner. I’ll show you who receives the magazine, what’s already taken in your category, and exactly what I can and can’t prove about each channel. You get something useful out of it whether or not we ever work together.
Free and no obligation. A local owner picks up.