Jewish Review hits the street all over Oregon

By Kaplan Tuttlebaum

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The Jewish Review recently placed news boxes on the streets of five small cities in Oregon well outside the Portland metropolitan area. This is the first time the Review has reached out in this way to potential readers far beyond Portland.

Review Editor Paul Haist said the move was made possible by a generous grant from the Edwin Cohen Foundation of Vestal, New York, which previously funded the placement of news boxes around Portland.

"I ordered these new boxes several months ago, but placing them took all this time because smaller municipalities tend more toward regulation of news box placement than big cities," said Haist.

The city of Portland does not regulate news boxes at all, for example.

"When I called the city halls in Bend, Ashland, Salem and other cities where there are Jewish communities, their initial advice, almost uniformly, was that I would need permission or even a permit," said Haist.

He tried to place the boxes also at large grocery outlets, but ran into resistance at the corporate level in most cases.

"This was more difficult that I thought it would be," said Haist. "Finally and feeling a little frustrated, I called around to the city halls again just last month and pleaded our case.

"Something had changed. One after another, they told me it was a First Amendment issue and they didn't regulate box placement, except for common-sense guidelines about right-of-way clearance."

In the last week of June Haist rented a van and placed five boxes in Salem, Corvallis, Eugene, Ashland and Bend.

Members of the Jewish communities in each of the small cities will keep the boxes stocked.

The recent placement of boxes completed the distribution of 10 boxes purchased earlier this year. The first five of that order were placed in and around Portland, bringing to 10, the number of boxes in the Portland area.

Haist said the boxes have proved effective in building circulation for the Jewish Review

After the first five boxes were placed in Portland a year ago, subscription cards were inserted into the papers that were placed in those boxes, so it was possible to track how many new subscriptions resulted from placing the news boxes.

Combined with the additional circulation of the papers placed in the boxes, the Jewish Review's readership grew by approximately 10 percent in the first eight months after the first five boxes were placed, also as a result of the Cohen Foundation's generosity.

A similar subscription card strategy will be employed with the new boxes.

"We should be very grateful to the Cohen Foundation for making this possible," said Haist. "In all the years I have edited our little paper, this is the first thing we have done to boost circulation that has provided significant results."

The Cohen Foundation initially sought out the Jewish Review and offered the paper an unsolicited grant. The following year, they returned and encouraged the Review to apply for a second grant.

The paper did apply. The grant request was approved, and additional funds were provided above the requested amount for the broadly defined purpose of building readership.