Coffee News Brews For Benton County

Owners of Headspring LLC of Fayetteville, Jonathan Pelphrey and his wife Irina Pelphrey, started publishing Coffee News in October.
The weekly sheet showed up first at Fayetteville area restaurants, but the duo started a Springdale and Tontitown edition in March, and zoned editions for Bentonville should show up in May and in Rogers sometime in June.
The group distributes to about 200 locations in Washington County, Jonathan Pelphrey said.
Coffee News is an 11-inch by 17-inch sheet, printed on both sides. Both left and right columns are dedicated to 3-inch by 2-inch ads, which start at $39 per week per edition. There is room for 32 ads in each edition.
Editorial copy, which is mostly horoscopes, oddities and trivia, runs down the center column.
“Everything is designed to draw the eye from the copy to the advertiser,” Jonathan Pelphrey said.
The group prints just under 3,000 copies for Washington County. But Pelphrey said he calculates about 80 percent of the readership either leave the issue behind or put it back in the rack. He estimates that anywhere from 4 to 10 readers see each copy.
Pelphrey saw Coffee News in Tulsa and St. Louis. He called around and found it was a franchise based in Bangor, Maine.
Franchises start at $6,000 for the territory with a population of up to 60,000, and $5,000 for each additional 40,000.