Matthew Steele is the publisher of Little Village, Iowa City’s iconic alt magazine that celebrated its 15th birthday last year. Known for its sharp, high-quality journalism and its artistic vibe, the magazine’s success is well deserved, but it didn’t come easy. Matt has shared some of the publication’s deep roots, storied history and early challenges in the first installment of this series.

This is part two of our conversation, where we touch on Little Village’s distribution model, storytelling, print vs digital, the role of local press and more. Stemming from the last seven years of being at the helm of his widely beloved bi-weekly publication, Matt’s insights are as entertaining as they are illuminating. Enjoy!

Your distribution model is essentially “self-serve”: you put the issues out there and people pick them up. Some people take the magazine with them, some people read them and put them back in the stack. I presume that presents some unique challenges to you as a publisher. For one, how do you gauge the size of your readership? Also, perhaps even more importantly, how do you convince potential advertisers that your numbers are accurate and that an ad in Little Village is worth their money? Or perhaps you don’t need to and it all boils down to the reputation and trust you have build up in the community over the years?

Yeah. Advertisers are people, too—they respond to emotion, and want to be a part of a great story. If they never see anyone walking around with your magazine, they’ll assume no one reads it. If they see someone they respect—or a customer—carrying it around, then everyone reads it!

You do have to watch your audience, and we do. Every time our distributor goes out, he counts how many are remaining at every location. We always leave a few behind in every location if they’re there at all, but we strive for zero returns. He’s got 550 distribution locations he’s in contact with, and he knows how they’re going. And if he notices that one is flown a lot faster, he goes and grabs from somewhere else and fills it up. It’s a two-week long distribution cycle.

But there’s an industry standard for a weekly that you estimate two and a half readers per copy that got picked up. So if we are a two-week cycle, then we think that two and a half number is super safe, because we have double the shelf life. So we do do the work on the distribution side to make sure those returns are close to zero, and then we estimate two and a half readers for every one of the 10,000 copies that we print and distribute.

That number I think is pretty solid. We’ve got receipts and clipboards full of numbers to back it up.

I track much more closely the digital stuff. That’s my harbinger.

If our page views are over the last four months lower than they were four months before, then I sound the alarm: “Editorial team, something’s going on, we’re not reaching our audience. People don’t care right now.”

I get that you care. I care. They don’t care. And we need to figure out why and fix it. Because eventually, as your audience goes, so go your clients, so goes your organization.

I want to know that before my clients know it, and then we make the corrections, then the next months we are “OK, we righted the ship,” we’re back on that continued gross growth cycle.

And I’m just like an animal about that stuff, how to not let our numbers go down.

I just really believe it’s good when the sales are up, it’s good. But if the audience numbers are down, sooner or later the sales will start falling. So that’s what we chase day after day.