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Issue 2 of The Town Crier, my micro-newspaper/newsletter, is out in the world. Like the inaugural issue, I printed 100 issues and distributed them throughout our little town.

Believe it or not, the public schools started back on 21 July 2026. Yes, you read that correctly—students were back the third Tuesday in July. That seems borderline criminal to yours portly. That means teachers have been back even longer.

Most of the schools in South Carolina are transitioning to a quasi-/semi-year-round calendar. There are certainly perks, such as defeating the dreaded “summer slump,” and students get breaks at the end of every quarter, avoiding the long Labor Day-to-Thanksgiving slog of the first semester (and the seemingly endless April and May death march in the second semester). But there’s something about darkening the door of a schoolhouse in July that sends shivers up my spine. July is sacred—and hot! Nobody wants to learn anything when it’s 100-degrees out, the humidity is somehow above 100%, and bookbags make youngsters resemble tiny Quasimodos.

But I digress. Naturally, I touched upon the return to school in a far hokier manner in The Town Crier. The point of The Town Crier is to recapture something of the cheesy, blandly inoffensive, yet still charming little local newsletters of my youth. These would be sitting in tiny mom and pop diners and local eateries; you’d grab one and read some fun trivia while you waited for your meal. These were even more fun when traveling, as they offered a little glimpse into the local world.

I also continued to experiment with the formatting and layout in this second issue. A guy on a Discord chat recommended adding the shadowing to the masthead, which really does add more weight and heft to the title. I also added in some “fun facts” and a Bible verse. I took that experimentation even further with Issue 3, wherein I introduce some graphics to the masthead and throughout the paper, and reduced the crossword “solution” grid so it’s not so easy to glance at it mistakenly (more on that next week).

While this micro-newspaper is meant for the Marlboro County, South Carolina region, please feel free to print and distribute your own copies, or to read the current issue here:

I also extended my distribution network this time around, spreading my 100 issues across more locations in the hopes of reaching more folks in more diverse settings. Here’s what I did, and some observations from the second distribution.

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