The Village Voice of Ottawa Hills

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Village Voice of Ottawa Hills ([1]) is a monthly community magazine that serves the village of Ottawa Hills, Ohio a suburb of Toledo, Ohio.

In 1973 Mary Morris and Lynn Rubini, a pair of Villagers frustrated by the lack of coverage of Village news in the local media, decided to start an independent community newspaper to meet the needs of the residents of the Village of Ottawa Hills. The first issue of The Village Voice of Ottawa Hills, all four pages of it, arrived in May, 1974.

The paper struggled through 11 more issues, ranging from four to six pages, until May, 1975, when Rubini took a full-time job and was unable to continue working on the publication. With the apparent demise of The Voice at hand, one of Rubini's friends, Hadley Miller, called a woman she knew, Sharon F. Simmons, to see if she might be able to help.

Simmons responded to Miller's plea for assistance, and soon met with Rubini. At their first meeting Simmons was presented with a large box. It contained all of the files and records of the newspaper. She was now the editor/publisher of the Village Voice of Ottawa Hills.

In September 1975 Simmons and then-associate editor Russ Galbraith produced their first issue of the paper. The paper grew, with the first 16-page edition coming in 1980. Over the years, Simmons, with the aid of Ron L. Coffman, who joined the staff in the early 1980s as associate editor, grew the paper to an average of 32 pages a month.

After a stint of 30 years as editor and publisher, in January 2005 Simmons sold the newspaper to Village Voice Publishing, Ltd., an Ohio Limited Liability Company created by business partners and Village residents Yarko Kuk and Tony Bassett.

Since the purchase, the paper has continued to evolve with Kuk and Bassett serving as co-editors. The first digitally-produced edition rolled off the presses in March 2005. In April 2005 the use of spot color returned (it had only been used once before, in September 2000, to mark the 25th anniversary of the paper's continuous publication).

The publishers took the next logical step -- the use of four-color -- in July, 2005. The paper finally launched a website in March, 2006. The paper has evolved over the past three decades from a mere four page newsletter to a monthly publication raging from 28 to 44 pages.

In addition to monthly news and feature stories, the paper also has a number of popular listings and columns, including the Police Beat, Villagers in the News, the Great Outdoors, Voices of the Past, and Scrapbook. In a community that values public education as much as village residents do, the Focus on Schools section is another widely-read portion of the paper.

With over 1,200 subscribers, the paper reports a readership of nearly 3,000 people.