FNP 51 Page 24 we at least know it's a legitimate letter. P: When you put out your paper, did you ever try to get any national columnists, like Dear Abby or anything like that? G: We're running one now, Ann Landers. A friend sent us something, and we sent it back and said, we'd love to run her column but we're not able to afford this. Ironically enough, I got a buzz here a week or so later and someone said, there's a Mrs. Ann Landers on the phone for you. So I picked up the phone and it's Ann Landers. We talked and we had a good time on the telephone, and she cut us a deal. We've been running her column ever since. P: But that's pretty limited for a weekly paper. G: Most of our columns, if you'll go through our papers are all home-spun columns, P: So you have now a much larger staff in terms of reporters and columnists. G: We run the Madison County Carrier and then we have the Madison Enterprise Reporter and then we have a third newspaper, Madison County News. The Madison County News has been established now for about five years. We have a total circulation of nine. The Madison County News that we started about five or six years ago is really a scavenger paper. It's a one sheet, eight and a half by eleven. We run off ten or twelve copies of it. We pick up just stuff that we've run in either the Madison paper or the other paper that's already set up. It takes us about ten or fifteen minutes a week to do it. We've met all the criteria of the post office. It's as legal a newspaper as the Madison County Carrier or the Enterprise Recorder, so we [have] three legal newspapers, as far as that carry legal ads and meet all the postal regulations. A number of years ago, a paper started in here, just one that was coming off of a copy machine, and that came out on a eleven- seventeen folded and was running off 300 copies. So, when they hit the street one week, the following day, we came out with the Madison County News. I said, Madison won't have three newspapers unless all three of them's mine. It can have four. So, right now, we've got the three legal newspapers. The Madison County News, we run off ten or twelve copies of it. It sells for $0.09 cents a piece in one location, which is our uptown newspaper office. Nobody buys it. The subscriptions are $100 a year. We have no subscribers. But, it's sitting there, and if we ever need to bring it to life for any reason, it's sitting there idling on the runway. P: It is mainly in case somebody tries to compete. G: If we get a serious threat of any kind, the county commissioners will have a choice of taking two real newspapers, like they're doing right now with our Madison County Carrier and the Madison Enterprise Recorder, or they can take this other paper and the Madison News if they want to deal with that kind. So, right now, I don't have any