Chris Baird from Serve Daily visits Art City Elementary's Journalism Club

Submitted by julia.murray on Fri, 04/25/2014 - 10:52

Art City Elementary Journalism students had the opportunity to listen and talk to Chris Baird, owner and editor of "Serve Daily" newspaper. "At Serve Daily our number one goal is to Promote Service and Random Acts of Kindness. We love to serve and we figured out after the course of a two and a half years that a great way to serve the community is to provide a paper where local events, activities, news, life’s events (missions, scouts, weddings, and so forth), restaurant reviews, hard work promotions, local artists/musicians/authors and more can be featured."  Chris said, last year, that when walking down the streets of Provo and Orem delivering his paper, not many people noticed, but when he was walking Springville and Spanish Forks Main street delivering papers, people actually stopped him and asked him if he was starting a local paper.  Our community likes to read about the things that are going on in our community. When asked about the future of the "News paper" he responded that he knows that there are still people, including himself, that enjoy having something tangible that you can read, mark-up, write in the margins.  He is keeping it as a paper for as long as people will support it.  He also has a website (servedaily.com) that you can read his past papers and follow blogs.  Right now the paper is 12 pages, his goal is  to have it up to a 20 page paper being.  Right now he is not making any money on the paper, it is holding it's own as far as having enough advertising to pay for printing and delivery costs.  Chris is following a dream to help others be informed readers and to Serve Daily--Pay Forward, he even has cards that he passes out that if you do an act of kindness you leave behind a card, he hopes that after four acts of kindness that card will eventually make it back to him.  It is always more enjoyable to read about the good things that are happening in our communities and not all of the tragedies. 

After Chris reads edits and writes articles he uses a template to place articles advertisements and pictures in a computer program, when completley satisfied he then sends the paper electronically to a company in Salt Lake (that also produces the Daily Herald and the Salt Lake Tibune); the paper gets bundles into stacks of 100-200 stacks delivered to Chris then he delivers them to the Nebo School District and various other stores to be passed out.  His greatest motto is "Do a good turn daily--Then Pay it forward".