LNP|LancasterOnline created the Celebrate campaign to bring attention to LNP’s 225^th anniversary as one of the oldest newspapers in the United States. There’s no doubt about it, Celebrate was a highly creative campaign. When was the last time you heard of a local newspaper celebrating its 225^th  anniversary by enlisting a five-piece brass band to play a march song from the 1950s? And the song was written by a local bandleader specifically for the newspaper to boot!

The tagline for our Celebrate campaign was, “Your Story is Our Story.” It was catchy, playful, and fitting for a newspaper brand since stories are our business. The aim of the tagline was twofold:

• To underscore our company’s long history in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.
• To affirm our local presence in the community.

It’s easy for people to dismiss local news as part of a larger conglomerate with no connection to or meaningful presence in the community. One message we hoped to drive home in the Celebrate campaign is that our journalists and employees are local citizens. They live, worship, shop, and socialise alongside our subscribers. The stories that impact the lives of our subscribers are the same stories that impact the lives of our newspaper staff each day.

One way we highlighted this piece of our message was in the special commemorative section we created and delivered on June 17^th, 2019 — the exact day of our 225^th anniversary. The section was delivered to all homes within our delivery area, not just subscribers.

The commemorative section walked readers through a day in the life of the newspaper. It included photos of LNP|LancasterOnline employees at work and explained the impact each employee role has on the production, content, and delivery of LNP|LancasterOnline every day.

Celebrating the “newspaper man”

Another distinctive creative element that appeared consistently throughout the Celebrate campaign was Lancaster City’s “newspaper man.”

Steinman Park, named for former publishers John F. Steinman and James Hale Steinman, opened on June 14, 1981. Today, the park provides a beautiful, relaxing, and natural respite for downtown shoppers, visitors, and workers.

Seated on a bench at the entrance to the park is a life-sized, bronze statue of a man reading the newspaper. Beside him on the bench are earlier versions of today’s LNP|LancasterOnline, telling of man’s first steps on the moon and announcing the Three Mile Island nuclear accident.

Katherine Graham, the former chairman, CEO, and publisher of The Washington Post, spoke at a dedication of the park in 1981, saying the newspaper man “will stand as a living memorial to the best kind of relationship between a newspaper and its city.”

Graham was absolutely right; the newspaper man is extremely popular. Residents, visitors, and even dignitaries stop at 20 West King Street, just steps away from the entrance to LNP|LancasterOnline headquarters, to take photos and selfies with him every day.

Our hope in incorporating this unique component into the Celebrate campaign was to highlight the relationship we’ve cultivated with the community over 225 years and to make the most of the familiarity of the newspaper man as a Lancaster landmark.

We believe the newspaper man was a unique creative component of the Celebrate campaign and an effective way of connecting our brand to the comfortable habit of reading a newspaper, while acting as a subtle reminder to the community of our deep roots in Lancaster County and the commitment we feel to being its best source of local news and information.

Banner photo courtesy of Pexels from Pixabay.

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