Skip to footer

Seek out community newspapers for free activities and coupons

Free community newspapers are perhaps the most useful resource available for finding interesting inexpensive and free things to do in your local community and in the communities around where you live.

|
Melanie Stetson Freeman/The Christian Science Monitor
A man walks by a row of newspaper vending machines on Boylston Street, in this May 2012 file photo in Boston, Massachusetts. Many of the papers are free. Our personal finance expert recommends perusing free community newspapers for tips for free activities and coupons.

One of my routines when I visit the grocery store is to stop by the entrance where there are a bunch of free newspapers available for anyone who wants to take them. I usually wind up taking one of each.

These newspapers cover the Des Moines area as well a a lot of the rural communities around Des Moines. They are perhaps the most useful resource available to me for finding interesting inexpensive and free things to do in my community and in the communities around where I live.

A great example of this kind of free newspaper is Cityview, a free independent newspaper that’s been around the Des Moines area for a couple decades. They have wonderful local political coverage, a very long community calendar, and usually an interesting feature article or two every single week.They usually have a fairly robust schedule of upcoming events for the communities they serve. As I mentioned the other day, I usually use the internet to find community calendars for my local area. The calendars I find in local newspapers usually have some overlap with the ones I find online, but they usually have some unique items as well.

Almost every time I leaf through a local newspaper, I find something interesting to do in the next week in either my own community or some community near mine.

They’re often loaded with coupons for local businesses. Newspapers like these tend to be supported by advertisements coming from local businesses, and these businesses know that the people who read free newspapers tend to be the bargain hunters.

Because of that, a very high proportion of the ads I find in free newspapers tend to have coupons attached to them. Because of these coupons, I’ve picked up some very inexpensive groceries, bought some gifts at a big discount, and I’ve even enjoyed some free meals. In fact, the last time I had work done on my Honda Pilot, I used a coupon from a local newspaper to knock some off the price.

They cover community news, often in great detail. Free newspapers tend to be a pretty good source for information about the community, and not just the cover stories, either.

I’ve found information on ongoing construction projects, notices of upcoming elections, auction notices, and lots of other little tidbits that I’ve found useful. In each of these cases, the local newspaper has either saved me time, made it easier for me to participate in the community, or saved me money by alerting me to something I didn’t know or had forgotten.

Take a look at the free local papers for your community and surrounding communities. There is a lot of value between the covers.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Seek out community newspapers for free activities and coupons
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Business/The-Simple-Dollar/2012/0625/Seek-out-community-newspapers-for-free-activities-and-coupons
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe