Direct Mail That Works…for Local Blogger.

Posted by Laura Bergells

March 25, 2005

Obviously, the postcard that my friend received in the mail today didn’t spend a lot in graphic design (see below.) But boy, was it ever effective!

When I saw it, I instantly knew what to do. This direct mail piece contained a strong call to action and no extraneous information to confuse me: I went to the site immediately.

And I loved the cryptic tagline “…reporting the news the news won’t report” — brilliant! An underground news blogsite! The name and tagline said it all, and the Courier, type-writer font appealed to my 40-something sense of nostalgia for old-style, underground reporting. You know, the kind where the writer talks about how “The Man” is puttin’ down “the people“.

If you take the site seriously, it’s a wrenching indictment of many of the “powers that be” in Grand Rapids. But the site, with its flair for bombast, also works well as a parody or spoof of a quaint underground paper, written by a man (in this case, self-described “working stiff”, William Tingley) who is railing against “The Man” (political and corporate cheeses in West Michigan.) All in all, it’s near perfect blog fodder.

The site itself is powered by Typepad, and the public interest and media links alone make it a site worthy of a bookmark…if you live in Grand Rapids! Oddly, the RSS or Atom feature hasn’t been activated so that you can easily have the site pop in your blog aggregator.

However, you can copy http://www.localareawatch.org/atom.xml in your blog aggregator so that you can get fresh feeds.