We have an interesting back story, and are proud to be presenting a mash of traditional and new media journalism to The Woodlands, Spring, Conroe & North Houston.

The Paper Magazine has history behind it and the concept. Traditional print publications have been having a hard time financing themselves in the last few years, and many have actually laid off their employees and closed their doors. Hyper-local community news publications have begun to sprout up with niche markets on the Internet for prominant areas all over the country to cover the local news and encourage community journalism to be delivered and offer low-cost advertising alternatives for small businesses to market their operations. Online publications are still trying to figure out how to present, profit and pay for their product production, and the future of online newspapers is a day-by-day experiment with challenges and dreams.

The Recession and weak economy of the past few years has made it difficult for small businesses to stay prosperous in these times, and sometimes in order to do so, staff cuts and reductions of advertising and promotional expenses have been initiated. The idea of even attempting to publish a community news publication in such an environment seems to be a risky challenge. But such challenges are important to the future of our coverage communities, so The Paper's small and unpaid staff stepped up to the mound on October 26, 2008 and decided to accept the challenge.

Editor and Publisher is native Houstonian Bob Gunner. Bob is chief programmer as well and designer of the site interface as well as managing content manager. He was previously employed by a large Houston-area Law firm, Ammons Law, where he was Media Coordinator and Webmaster. Before that, Bob was the Managing Cluster Editor and Content Manager for Bayou City Media, Inc. in The Woodlands and before that, one of The Houston Webmasters for Clear Channel Radio, where he was responsible for the eight radio web sites revisions, including daily site news coverage for the KTRH and KPRC sites.

Bob has been employed as a news editor and journalist at Houston area daily and weekly newspapers since the 1970's. Bob created The Paper as a free community tool to keep his new media journalism skills sharp and up-to-date.

Our staff up to now work full-time jobs as well as contribute to this publication. In the beginning, we decided that in order for us to build the dream and create a business venture that would create profit later on down the line, we needed to be realistic and initially offer free advertising to the retailers in our community to help them survive the rough times we were all facing. We programmed The Paper to give the community Web 2.0 tools such as free classified ads and job ads and all the bells and whistles of social networking which have gained popularity in the past couple of years. This was step one of our business plan.

Bob has built a network of community contacts over the years and because of these connections is able to present local news items on a daily basis. Our three weekly contributing columnists Steve Bussiere (who is also associate publisher and assisted Bob in creating our vision), Ron Mitchell has produced some incredible columns as well.

In the past year or so, we have built our product and site visitor statistics and have accomplished what we set out to do. We have had over 2.5 million page views and have a Google PR rating of three out of ten. Our news stories are regularly being spotlighted by Google News updates and we have established partnerships with several new content sources. These are wonderful accomplishments for an online publication only a year  or so old, and we are proud of them. We want to thank all our readers and supporters for helping us get where we are today.

As mentioned earlier, The Paper has an interesting history, back in the 1970's Bob was the editor of a weekly community broadsheet newspaper in the North Channel area of Houston. It was called The Paper as well, and Bob partnered with the small publisher for five years to build that publication into a weekly thrown to 40,000 members of the community. Because of financial matters, the publisher closed the doors of that publication, but told Bob when he published his own newspaper some day, he could have the name.

After being laid off by Bayou City Media due to budget cuts, Bob and his best friend Steve decided to create the online version of The Paper, and that's how we have come to where we are today.

Our next step? We plan to become more visible in our coverage communities, present stronger editorial coverage, and serve our local businesses by presenting low-cost ad opportunities and directories that will give them more bang for the buck as they help support community journalism. The Paper Magazine, Your Hyper-Local News and Entertainment Magazine. This is our niche...