Publisher’s Perspective
I made a significant change this month that will be life-changing for me. This tweak in our business model will help accomplish a number of things all at the same time, and I have to say that I’m quite proud of myself for doing it, not because I think I’m a business guru for making the change but because I worked through the fear and actually pulled the trigger. Making major changes in the frequency, distribution, content, etc. can be really scary just as making similar changes in any business can create fear. You don’t always know what effects a given action is going to have.
And that’s the case here, too. I don’t really know what’s going to happen, but I am feeling really good about it right at this moment. So let me tell you about these changes and how it is already positively affecting the business and my life overall.
What I’ve done is actually very simple. We are now producing Zion Guide as a bimonthly publication — in the current case, July and August. Since its inception, beginning as a two-page Springdale Map and developing into the 24-page edition that it is now, Zion Guide has morphed into the most comprehensive guide to the Zion National Park area, complementing the information distributed by the National Park Service, whose information is core to visitors’ Zion National Park experience. But it’s largely for the park and not so much for the surrounding areas, which makes sense. It’s the NPS’s mandate to produce and provide info for the park, not for the towns, recreational areas, businesses, and other state and national parks. That’s where we come in.
Since it began as an insert in The Independent, Zion Guide was automatically revised and reprinted every month along with the rest of The Independent. And although in some aspects it is really nice to be able to revise the content each month, the reality has been that very little content changed from month to month. The audience for Zion Guide by and large comprises visitors to the greater Zion National Park area. So the folks reading it today are not the exact same people who’ll be reading it next month and the month after. Sure, plenty of folks return for additional visits; but in an average year, the vast majority of our tourists will come through the area just once.
So after processing all of that for a couple of years, I started seriously thinking about publishing Zion Guide less frequently. And while that change may not seem like a life changer, it’s going to have a much larger impact than it might seem on my day-to-day life, and I’m excited to tell you how.
Starting July, I won’t have a looming deadline for Zion Guide, which is really what has received the bulk of my time and attention in this last three years. That’s partly because I moved to Springdale in 2015 and then bought a house in Kanab in 2016, thereby establishing those two areas as my primary stomping grounds. Because of that, most of the businesses I hit up to advertise want to be in Zion Guide as the main focus of their marketing is to drive visitors to their businesses. And that’s been great!
At 24 pages, the July/August issue of Zion Guide, which accompanies this July edition of The Independent, is the largest we’ve ever produced. That’s largely dictated by the volume of advertisers, but it has the desirable byproduct of allowing us to add more content in those extra pages.
So while I’ve said it before, this issue of Zion Guide is by far the best we’ve ever done. I could make a long list of all the little updates, tweaks, additions, and modifications, but I’m going to keep it to the major ones that were facilitated by the growth to a 24-page edition.
Those include the return of the Springdale Dining Guide on the Springdale Map page. This updated guide has a compact and very functional listing of info on each dining establishment in Springdale.
We also created two new features. The first is an article on safety. While it doesn’t sound very sexy, there are many reasons why we decided to prioritize prominent space to detail the most recent trend in our national parks: people requiring search and rescue at increasing rates. Visitation to our area national parks continues to increase, a trend that is also seen throughout the National Park System nationwide. As such, responding to the increased — and increasing — frequency of incidents and accidents is taxing NPS resources at a higher rate. People are getting dehydrated and succumbing to heat exhaustion, and with more visitors, there are more incidences of falls and injury. So with a little input from me, our editor, Jason Gottfried, put together a locals’ guide to hiking. We hope this information helps to educate the public that nature is often not that forgiving. Check out this new feature on page 5 of Zion Guide.
The second feature we added was a lot of work (a special thank you to our editor Jason on this one). What we realized is that while the majority of visitors to Zion National Park do hike in the park and likely appreciate our maps and hiking info, most of them will be staying in, or at the very least passing through, some amazing towns and cities on their way to and from Zion. And while we would never deter anyone from going on a nice hike inside Zion National Park, the greater Zion area has so much more to offer.
That’s where this new piece comes in. Jason took on the task of assembling short descriptions of the seven major city and town areas within a short drive of Zion National Park. Between them, they offer an incredible variety of experiences available to visitors and locals alike. Check out this feature on page 20 of the current Zion Guide.
Additionally, we returned what is likely the most fun feature to Zion Guide. Yes, the Zion Animals Coloring Page is back! I know you’ve all missed it. But the reality is that if you’re stuck in your car, a restaurant lobby or a hotel room or you just want to make Billy the Bighorn Sheep purple, this is the best feature you can have. See page 11 in the guide.
You’re probably asking yourself by now where in all of this is the life change. Well, it’s subtle, but it’s right in all of that. By producing this beautiful Zion Guide for July and August, I won’t have a Zion Guide as my primary focus this month. So that change frees up almost a whole month of my time every other month to work on something else. Or not work. And therein lies this major shift for me. If I know myself, I will still work. A lot. But I also know that I need to play more and take more time off for myself for travel, leisure, education, discovery, etc.
So I’ll see you out in the wilderness! Happy reading.
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