Publish Further Review Pages in Your Newspaper

It's quite simple, really. Just ask.

We don't charge at all. The Spokesman-Review provides these pages as a public service to other newspapers, large and small.

Yeah, we probably are. But that doesn't change the fact that your paper can have the pages for free.

Send our Further Review creator/editor Charles Apple an email using the form above. Give him the email addresses you want added to his email list. He sends out an email every Friday that contains links to the new pages he's posting. And he also lets you know what he's planning to work on next.

In a typical week, four. Sometimes only three and sometimes a little more, depending on how quickly he can build them and how quickly our copy desk can get them edited.

Absolutely! Have you seen Charles' typing skills?

He builds them all in Adobe Illustrator but saves them as PDF files. If your editors are using one of the standard page design applications, then they should be able to drag and drop the file directly onto a news page. All the photos have been sized to 200 dpi and toned to reproduce well on a newspaper press.

Not unless you plan to open the pages in Adobe Illustrator. If you find something that's broken or in error, let Charles know. It'd be a lot easier if he fixed it and sent out a corrected version.

Then write or call your editor — you can probably find the email address and/or phone number on your paper's web site or in the fine print near the bottom of the second page of your daily paper. Send them to this web site. Or to this very web page. If you can talk the editor into joining our mail list — well, that would be the first step.

Good question. Since no money changes hands and no bills are being sent out, we haven't assigned anyone to track that. What Charles can tell you: 251 newspapers in 30 states have requested access to his Further Review pages, either individually or via their corporate offices. This includes 98 dailies. Texas has the most: 57 papers and 21 dailies. In Connecticut, its 29 papers including nine dailies. And in Georgia, 18 papers — five of them daily — have access.

So many papers were hurting bad during the pandemic: Ad sales were slow. News itself was slow. Editors were reporting they were finding it difficult to fill their papers.

Spokesman-Review Editor Rob Curley heard about this and realized: What editors needed was filler -- but not just any filler. They needed high-quality filler that wouldn't read like filler. Something readers would love.

So he called Charles and suggested: What happens if we simply give away your pages?

Charles says he thought that was the dumbest idea he had ever heard. So naturally, he was all in favor of it.

The paper didn't have an infrastructure to handle something like this, but Charles still rents space on an FTP storage server that he used in his blogging, consulting and teaching work. So he parked the PDF pages there and began sending out links to editors he had met over the years.

Word spread. A couple of industry trades wrote about it. His weekly email list grew.

He used to tell people that "20 or 30" papers were getting his pages. But one day, he realized he was getting emails from readers in cities that weren't on his list. That's when he realized that some of the editors were, in fact, newspaper group editors who were relaying his emails to the papers they owned.

After conferring with some of these editors, Charles spent a day looking up all the papers owned by these groups. That's when he found his list was going out to 250 papers.

His list has been fairly stable since then. He's lost a couple but picked up a few more. Which is why he now says the number is 251.

He writes about history. Science. Sports. Pop culture, including music, movies and TV shows. Elections. Holidays. You'll find he does a lot of special pages for some holidays and for the holiday season in particular. And you can count on him for multiple pages each February for Black History Month.

He does. But keep in mind: He plans up to a year in advance and builds pages two or three weeks in advance. But if you have an idea that tops one on his to-do list, he's usually delighted to swap out his plans.

Rob doesn't seem inclined to stop. Neither does Charles.

Um... No comment?