ANR to launch new e-newsletter product, increasing timeliness

Several changes are coming to the Aurora News-Register in the coming weeks, reflecting input from our readers as part of a national study to help save local news.
Teri Finneman, a community journalism specialist from the University of Kansas, led a focus group project this summer which gathered information on a variety of topics, all designed to help local ownership and staff of this publication better understand what the community wants and expects from its hometown newspaper. The following are some of the first steps planned in an on-going effort to give the ANR a more timely presence as your source of local news.
One of the first steps will be the launching of a new e-newsletter product, scheduled to debut Oct. 3. Feedback we received from focus groups and surveys indicated that ANR has a loyal audience, but you want news in a more timely and modern manner. In fact, 69 percent of participants responding to our survey expressed interest in receiving an e-newsletter as a means of getting local news more often than the weekly print schedule.
We plan to begin with a weekly e-newsletter which will be sent out on Fridays. The content will include summarized reports of news that has happened since the printed product rolled off the press on Tuesday, as well as previews of lead stories planned for the coming week. In addition, feedback from both the focus groups and survey suggested that a calendar of events showing what’s happening in the week ahead would be useful, so we plan to include that in the Friday email as well. 
This e-newsletter product will be included with the price of your subscription. In order to receive the e-newsletter, subscribers will need to sign up, which is as simple as providing us your email address. If you currently subscribe to ANR’s e-edition we already have your email address, obviously, so you’re good to go. If not, you can contact our office to provide that information. 
Details of our new subscription structure will be announced next week.

More timely news
The goal of making ANR more timely will be enhanced in other ways as well, utilizing our website and social media platforms, which include Facebook, X (formerly Twitter) and Instagram.
The most frequent comments in our reader feedback suggested that this newspaper “does a really good job, but readers want content in real time. The news is too slow.” In fact, 75 percent of respondents said they want to see stories available more frequently than once a week.
For the record, the ANR news staff has been publishing photos, videos, breaking news and brief reports to our website and social media platforms for several years. However, we’re gearing up to increase those efforts in response to reader input, thus inviting you to follow on social media or frequently check our website at auroranewsregister.com, which can be conveniently loaded onto your phone’s home screen.
Using last month’s Facebook Live stream of the Gambles building demolition as an example, which drew more than 70,000 viewers, you can expect to see more multimedia content from ANR moving forward. Many of those posts can be viewed at no cost, though more detailed reports will appear behind a paywall for subscribers only.
For a better explanation as to what this revamped news model will look like, consider this week’s ANR coverage of the Aurora football team. Reporting from the sidelines of each Husky game, home and away, ANR staff posts videos and updates throughout the game to the sports feed on ANR’s X platform. At the end of the game, we interview a player and post a 90-second Husky highlight video, which is posted to X, Facebook and Instagram as soon as possible. That unique content is available only on social media, often generating 2,000 views or more.
With more time to gather stats and comments from Coach Peterson, ANR staff then prepares a more detailed report of Friday’s game, which appears in the printed edition. That paper rolls off the press Tuesday at approximately 11 a.m. and is available to e-edition subscribers by noon. Newspapers are posted at distribution points around town and at news racks in Aurora, Hampton and Giltner that same day as well. Aurora residents who get their printed version by mail generally receive their copy as soon as Wednesday, or within a few days time, depending on the postal delivery schedule.

A growing audience
On a related note, Nebraska was part of a study conducted in 2025 by Coda Ventures, an independent research and consulting firm which surveyed adults 18+ across the state in both rural and urban communities to measure their media behaviors and purchase plans. The study confirms our own in-house findings, which show that newspaper audiences have grown overall in recent years, contrary to popular belief.
While the total number of people who subscribe to ANR’s weekly print edition is less than it was 10 years ago, our total audience is larger than it’s ever been. 
In addition to the 3,150 weekly print readers (a number based on national averages showing that approximately 2.1 people read each printed subscription), ANR has 390 e-edition subscribers, 12,875 monthly website visitors and 10,680 social media followers.