Dear Springfield Mama

I launched Dear Springfield Mama last summer with 100 moms’ email addresses scribbled on a list. As a former journalist and a local mom, I wanted something that wasn’t offered by traditional media: a local guide that understood the lifestyle moms are living.

I didn’t want a things-to-do list that included cocktail hours and live concerts that didn’t start until 10 p.m. I wanted to know how to connect with Springfield in a way that fits into my real life — recreation before the sun goes down, and preferably of the free variety.

It didn’t take long for me to realize that local media companies weren’t serving this large crowd of young and middle-aged moms. As one industry insider told me bluntly, there just isn’t enough money in that audience to make them worth targeting.

If it doesn’t exist, I thought, then I’ll just have to make it myself.

A lot of people responded to my idea with either a pat on the head or an eyeroll. “Good luck with your mommy blog!”

Well, I did it anyway.

I’ve built audiences before, and I have a fair bit of experience figuring out what people need and how to deliver it. I was a local journalist at the San Diego Union-Tribune and Los Angeles Times. I was in charge of training over 500 journalists on how to build their audience, and I helped launch the Springfield Daily Citizen when I moved back to my hometown.

The doubt started to creep in. Could I really do this on my own?

I always had a team behind me, and the shoulders of legacy media on which to stand. I had access to marketing departments and massive social media followings.

This time, I had to launch Dear Springfield Mama with nothing but an idea.

In the beginning, it felt like shouting into a void week after week.

But slowly, my work started to snowball. Through word of mouth, one hundred readers grew to a few hundred. Six months after I began publishing, I was nearing 800 families in the Dear Springfield Mama community.

Then something happened

This week, an industry friend forwarded me an email. A large local publication is launching a new family newsletter — one that sounds strikingly familiar, with echoes of my own words in its marketing materials.

It was one thing to see the potential of this audience finally recognized (yay!). It was another to see a legacy publication launch a product that didn’t just follow my lead, but mirrored the “mama-to-mama” format, structure, and categories I spent months building through surveys and conversations with all of you.

I had a strange reaction to it. My business brain kicked in first: Brittany, media companies launch new products all the time. A family newsletter isn’t exactly a novel idea. And anyway, competition isn’t personal, it’s business. In fact, it’s good business.

But then I think of that scene from “You’ve Got Mail” when Joe Fox strolls into Kathleen Kelly’s apartment with flowers. His monolith bookstore had put her little Shop Around the Corner out of business. And he says, “It’s not personal.”

She famously challenges him:

“I am so sick of people saying that. All that means is that it wasn’t personal to you. But it was personal to me. It’s personal to a lot of people.

“And what’s so wrong with being personal, anyway?”

That’s exactly how I feel. Like I’m standing in my bathrobe, clutching a vase of flowers, looking up at Goliath.

Dear Springfield Mama is a labor of love. It makes me zero income, and I expend a lot of energy building it. It’s personal. It’s my connection to this town, this community, and to hundreds of moms like me.

I want it to grow, and keep growing!

I don’t have a budget to buy social media ads, billboards, or radio spots. I don’t have a full-time sales and marketing team, or a team of staff and contract writers to fill it with content.

I just have me, my cell phone, and a 5-year-old cubicle mate who constantly interrupts me to ask if I can sharpen his crayons.

But I also have all of you, who have supported me from the beginning and show up week after week to read, write me back, and send me encouraging notes.

Now, more than ever, it would mean the world to me if you shared Dear Springfield Mama with a friend — over dinner, through email, or on social media.

Thanks for being in it with me.