The city of Sterling Heights is looking to update its current lifestyle magazine. In addition to more content, the new magazine will move from three issues a year to four.
Image provided by the city of Sterling Heights
STERLING HEIGHTS — Residents of Sterling Heights will soon be getting the city’s lifestyle magazine in a new, modernized format.
At its Aug. 6 meeting, the City Council voted to accept a proposal for the design and print production of a new magazine.
The city’s Community Relations Department, in an attempt to evolve and maximize the channels and formats for reaching and engaging with residents and businesses, has created a plan to replace the Sterling Heights Magazine, which gets mailed to residents three times a year.
The new magazine, which will be named Sterling Heights Lifestyle, will be mailed to residents four times a year and will be a high quality, full-color magazine integrating the city’s quality-of-life programming and amenities into a new format.
According to the meeting agenda packet, the primary objective of the new magazine is to effectively communicate all that Sterling Heights has to offer its residents and businesses without clouding the messaging with too much scheduling content that can be found on the city’s website.
“For years, we’ve talked about the limitations of the current class magazine, schedule magazine that we send out. It’s not in full color. It looks very dated,” said Councilman Mike Radtke.
Radtke added that the city has worked to change how it’s viewed in recent years — through things such as rebranding and other campaigns — and he thinks the magazine should reflect that. The new publisher, Studio Communications, publishes several other magazines that do a good job of that, he said.
According to Community Relations Director Melanie Davis, the current cost to publish the magazine is about $78,000 and that would increase to $86,500, which she said they hope to be able to offset with additional ad revenue.
Mayor Pro Tem Liz Sierawski said the current magazine contains a lot of valuable information for residents, but that it feels dated.
“It has a lot of valuable information. It gives us times on classes, but it does feel like my old high school newsletter,” she said. “It’s like the paper is less expensive. It’s not glossy. So to get a much better product that’s much more engaging for the residents, for a $9,000 investment, I think that’s a great deal.”
While the magazine would continue to have a lot of the same information, it would be published in a new format and include more content and a higher focus on storytelling that would appeal to residents.
“So instead of saying here’s two pages of a course catalogue of all the things that we’re offering at the community center, what we might do instead is go and find somebody who took a yoga class because they had back issues and now they’re an avid user of our yoga programs … and they want to talk about it, and so we tell their story, and then we provide a way for them to find all the information on every yoga class that we have on the website,” Davis said.
While it will continue to have important content, such as information on elections, passports, dog licenses and refuse collection, the new magazine will have it in a more concise format, Davis said. Not only will this cut down on space, but it will also increase readability, she said.
Davis said all of the content will be created internally by existing staff members.
However, Council member Deanna Koski voiced concern over the reduced amount of content.
“My question, bottom line is, how much of that information is going to be gone, and where is it going? Are you putting it on the website? Is that the only access that there will be to that information?”
Davis said that one option is to keep the listing of a class, but move most of the information to the website.
“Every single yoga class has like a paragraph description of what it is. What we might do is leave the listing of the yoga classes in there, but take that paragraph of information that is very specific about each class and put that online,” she said. “So you’ll see all the yoga classes we have in a very short, concise area, and then there might be a link or a QR code that would take you to the website that would have all the details about those yoga classes, but you’ll still see the classes that we have available in the magazine.”
The City Council voted unanimously to accept the proposal for the new magazine.
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