The Good News About Good News from In His Footsteps Podcast
Two women turn their love of good news into newspapers: online and print. Geri Weis-Corbley started the online Good News Network and Lisa Minney the print magazine Two Lane Living in West Virginia.
Bonus: how to turn your skills and commitments into a salary
OH! Inexpensive, unique, creative Mother’s Day gifts your mom will love.
Scroll to read the transcript and get links to more information.
These articles are written by Margaret Agard author of the In His Foot Steps memoirs:
Overwhelmed with more to do than time to do it in, Margaret began giving her daily to-do list to God. That’s when her new life began.
“”I liked the spunk and matter of fact way the author describes her daily walk with God. I liked the bits and pieces of wisdom throughout. It was a breath of fresh air from what I’m used to reading. It has little to do with productivity and everything to do with being led by the Spirit and serving others by asking God what to do every day.“
Justine
GoodreadsMale Speaker: Welcome to In His Footsteps with award winning author, Margaret Agard, sharing practical tips for living a joy-filled life and amazing interviews with people who do. Now, here’s Margaret.
Margaret Agard: Do you believe it‘s true that good news doesn’t sell? Lisa of Two Lane Living won’t agree and neither does Geri of goodnewsnetwork.org. You’re going to be meeting both these women today and $5 Mother’s Day gifts unique.
Male Speaker: Now, here’s this week’s bible question and answer brought to you by The Amazing Bible Timeline. Quickly see 6,000 years of bible and world history together on one color coded wall poster. Find out more about The Amazing Bible Timeline or ask your own Bible question at amazingbibletimeline.com.
Margaret Agard: The bible questions this week is why aren’t the dinosaurs in the bible? Or are they? First of all, not everything that was created is in the bible but according to some scientists, the animals described in Job chapter 40 and 41 could refer to dinosaurs. Chapter 40 talks about an animal called behemoth with a tail like a cedar who is not afraid of a raging river. While people speculate that that could have been an elephant or hippopotamus, a tail like a cedar doesn’t describe the tails of those animals. They are more like ropes.
Leviathan is a sea monster. Some people again suggest that might have been a crocodile or a whale, but the Hebrew language has a word for crocodile or whale so why would they have called it Leviathan. There are two cases of animals that might be considered to be dinosaurs in the bible and in addition while not everything that was created is mentioned in the bible, everything that is mentioned in the bible is in the correct order in which it was created.
Okay, $5 unique Mother’s Day gifts. I happen to be on this site fiverr.com and I just put in a search term, mother’s day and up popped about 20 gifts or things people would make or do for your mother for Mother’s Day and I called one of them. The point of fiverr.com of course is that everything people offer to make or do cost…you got it, $5.
From about 3:00 to 4:00 ToddElvis: Good morning, this is Todd.
Margaret Agard: Hi, this is Margaret Agard with the radio show.
ToddElvis: Oh, hi. How are you doing?
Margaret Agard: Good. Todd, how long have you been doing the Elvis impersonations?
ToddElvis: Well, I’ve been doing Elvis about 13 years now.
Margaret Agard: On Fiverr, you’ll call not just for Mother’s Day but for any day?
ToddElvis: Oh yes, I have something on it for calling for birthdays. I have something for calling anniversaries where I would sing the “Love Me Tender”. And for Mother’s Day, I would be calling and singing “The Wonder of You”.
Margaret Agard: “The Wonder of You”, so can you give us a few seconds of that? Maybe 15 seconds?
ToddElvis: Sure.
Sings “The Wonder of You”
link to Elvis singing it
link to ToddElvis on fiverr.com
Margaret Agard: Yes, you got that resonance in there. That’s good, Todd.
ToddElvis: Thank you very much.
Margaret Agard: Okay, you can just get on fiverr.com and look up Todd. Todd, how are you listed there?
ToddElvis: ToddElvis or you can just look on there under Elvis and find me for a happy birthday, for anniversaries, or for Mother’s Day.
Margaret Agard: Great. Thanks, Todd. That was just one of the fun ones up there. A couple of people who make videos with your own photos, and put music and happy to write, a poem for you.
Alright, good news. Jesus told us that “as a man thinketh, so is he”, if you spend all your time thinking about the bad and sad things that are going on. Not only do we get more of the same in the world, that’s who you become. That’s why, I like this website. This is what I go to every morning. It’s how I start my day. Goodnewsnetwork.org, I wanted to know how Geri came up with the idea, can she make a living off of it. How does she do it? How long ago did you start the Good News Network?
Geri: I’m in my 15th year. I started in 1997.
Margaret Agard: When the internet was fairly new and how did it start out?
Geri: I had always had the idea since I was in the television news business in DC that there should be a good news show. I worked in television for 10 years and I started a family. I left my career to start a family and then the internet came along and I thought, “aha” this is one way I could actually do a good news compendium by making my own website. I set it up in August of 1997 and flipped the switch and suddenly it was on worldwide and I just kept adding good news to it all the time. It grew and grew and grew.
Margaret Agard: That’s so fun. We put our first website up in 1997 too. It’s just fun to see how it grows. Now, have you always been the one who looks for all the news? When you started, was it basically you?
Geri: Yes, it was and it’s still basically me although I have a lot of hands now who send me links to stories and they also write stories for me sometimes. That helps an awful lot because there’s a lot more sources now for good news.
Margaret Agard: Did you ever suggest to the television stations you worked for that you should have a good news show?
Geri: Yes, my colleagues said good news doesn’t sell. I never believed them. Although I’ve heard that many times from industry professionals and I never believed it because at the time, the number one news paper insert was Parade and they always featured heroes. The number one magazine at the time, Reader’s Digest always had heroes on. The Oprah Winfrey Network had their Angel Network. I just didn’t believe it. I thought I bet you good news would sell.
Well, I finally got to the point I kind of proved somewhat it does sell because after doing it for free for 10 years, I was trying to think of how could I earn a salary for myself because I didn’t have time to really work the advertising angle. I polled my readers and 70% of them said that they would pay something for my good news service. I said there you go. I’m going to do that. So I started a “Pay what you want” type payment plant with the low price being $2 a month.
Starting in May 2008, I started charging for much of the good news. I still have a lot of free good news that goes out to the world.
Margaret Agard: The front page is free but if you click for more detail or for back story or whatever, then there’s a subscription request.
Geri: Well, there’s actually a whole section of news articles that are free. It’s called most popular. All those stories are free. I post them on Facebook. I have over 20,000 fans on Facebook and they all get those free stories and there’s a free newsletter – The Top 10 Good News of the Week – that goes out. Those are the stories from the most popular section.
Margaret Agard: Okay, that makes sense. It’s interesting to note that around 25% of the my subscribers choose to pay more. They don’t get anything out extra, they just choose to pay more because they value the service or they have more disposable income.
Margaret Agard: They want to support it. I like that. How has it changed your life?
Geri: I have said in the past that the best thing about creating the website is how it sort of transformed me. The benefit of doing something you really are afraid of is immense. I like the author Caroline May says “Do the thing that you really fear the most.”
Margaret Agard: Still, I’m not going to bungee jump off a really high building, but go ahead.
Geri: Changing the website into a membership site for money was definitely something I didn’t want to do and I had a lot of fear around that as well as starting the website in the beginning. It became a good news philosophy not only just a business and a website and a news outlet, it became a philosophy and when I was raising my three kids, I realized that you should look at the good in our every day home life. You should look at the good and focus on the good instead of focusing on the negatives. I started doing that with the kids more and realizing that it’s more important to look at what they’re doing right than what what they’re doing wrong.
Margaret Agard: I got that from reading “One-Minute Manager” which I just listened to with my husband. People are so afraid that if you don’t point out what’s bad, that they won’t give it up or something. We ignore that’s good and focus on what they’re not doing right but that’s perfect, Geri. Just this focus that you have in your life, of focusing on good news, you brought in to your parenting.
Geri: Yes, it’s interesting. I went to a positive psychology conference a couple of weeks ago and I found out the reason that good news doesn’t sell, so to speak, why people like bad news and why newspapers put on sensational or what-have-you. And why parents focus on the bad. This neurologist was speaking and he said that bad news and being fearful about things is like Velcro, it sticks. The good news is – and having a good time is like Teflon in your mind and in your memory because in the evolutionary times, it was more important for us to be afraid of what was in the bushes so it could keep us alive from the tiger that was lurking there.
Margaret Agard: Right. That makes sense.
Geri: At the end of the day when we’re like recounting our day, the negative things stick out more because of the where our brain is wired but the good news is – and they’ve done studies – scientists speaker that when you do start dwelling in the positive or if you think about a story for 10, 20, or 30 seconds or you dwell on the positive about your child for 20 seconds that it starts to actually create pathways and masses in the brain that help you more to focus on the positive and it changes your mental attitudes and it changes your brain.
Margaret Agard: Like digging a trench, like you’re out there digging this good news trench so that you can choose to become a cheerful and happy person who sees all the good going on around you, is what you’re saying?
Geri: Yes and it does. The good news then later affects you more. It sticks to you more. It is more and then it becomes more prevalent in your life – the good. There are studies that show then that optimisn creates more successful employees. People are hired first if they’re more optimistic and they’re more successful in their jobs and you have less heart attacks and lung disease if you’re optimistic. These are all scientifically proven things.
Margaret Agard: It’s true because who wants to work with or for kind of a depressed, angry, and look-how-bad-things-are person. We all want to follow the person who gives us hope and courage and encouragement.
Geri: Optimistic people are more open. They’re able to see more possibilities and of course, they work better with their co-workers.
Margaret Agard: I know. That’s something I’m working on now – it’s disagreement with my fundamental beliefs that would be upsetting to me. To learn to be happy that someone disagrees with my fundamental beliefs, that’s been a tough one for me. Have you noticed that or is it just me? It can be someone who completely disagrees with whatever my viewpoint is, whether it’s Republican or Democrat, whether you think you should have more or less welfare, what you should about immigrants. Whatever my stand on it, when someone takes the totally opposite view, I’ve noticed I can get very upset about that.
Geri: It’s taking a larger view and you know, over the years, I became more empathetic to those people because I can understand, I mean, I personally am an avid liberal and an avid Democrat but I can really understand and an interesting – when I go sometimes to campaigning things where we’re talking to the public, the person next to me is more like you. I know she argues with them and doesn’t know how to empathize and I can really see their point of view on things. I don’t know, maybe that’s part of the whole brain structure after being so positive for so many years. I don’t know.
Margaret Agard: I’m going to spend even more time on your site. I love your site, Geri. I love the idea that it’s going to get these things into my brain. People here in West Virginia sometimes have a hard time finding their own work. There’s not a lot of work here, number one. Number two, a lot of people are retiring here and they’re in their 60’s. They have a good 20 years left. You had some skills that you brought to this and I guess that’s the thought. How can you take your skills or how did you think through this to say that here’s what I want to do and now I’m going to grab the chance.
Geri: Well, I guess, well let’s see, it was ’97. I don’t know how old I was. I guess I was coming up…Yes, 45. I learned the new skills. I totally created the website from scratch myself. I researched what was the easiest software – easiest to learn and then I came with a huge manual and I read it and I learned the website myself and created it from the vision that I had in my head. I think it’s—
Margaret Agard: I’m impressed.
Geri: Yes, not very many people read large manuals for products and use it, but I was determined to learn how to create HTML website and now I do know. I’m a real geek now. I know a lot of stuff about…
Margaret Agard: Are you still maintaining it or do you have someone else maintain it now?
Geri: Yes, well, I do change the website every day. I update it every day, add the photos and all that, but I don’t do the technical back…but the point is that older people, in fact a lot of groups of seniors around the country listen – they have leaders in their little groups that share good news for my website and the ones that they like the best are the old people who do something new and something different and exciting step out of their comfort zones, which is I—
Margaret Agard: Think Colonel Sanders. I tell people, I’m in the Colonel Sanders phase of my life.
Geri: When did he start his restaurant?
Margaret Agard: He started out with just a recipe. How old was he? He was 68 and he did that for – I think he was 74 or 78 when he sold the idea that could change – the first thing he did was simply sell the recipe. They build the chains later. He just took off in his car with his recipe.
Geri: And Grandma Moses didn’t start painting until she was 80.
Margaret Agard: There you go.
Geri: I think yes, people who are retired; they are in their golden years, for sure. I mean golden in terms of shiny, you can do anything. You want to just choose to do it and with the internet now, oh my gosh, really celebrate that passion you’ve had your whole life.
Margaret Agard: And do that’s something new. That’s good for your brain. Learning something new actually helps to delay or prevent Alzheimer’s or dementia.
Geri: The onset of dementia. That’s absolutely true.
Margaret Agard: Okay, more good news. Alright, Geri, I do love your website and we gave a subscription to my Mom for Mother’s Day. I was so tired of her getting upset. She’s too old to be getting worried and upset because she was always listening to Rush Limbaugh always talking about the world is falling apart and I said you got to stop that mom.
Geri: It’s bad for your blood pressure. My blood pressure is so great. It never get goes up.
Margaret Agard: Thanks Geri.
Geri: Good for your mind. Good for your moods. Good for your spirit.
Margaret Agard: Good job.
Geri: Thank you very much.
Margaret Agard: If you just tuned in. This is Margaret Agard with In His Footsteps. You just heard from Geri, the founder of goodnetwork.org. There’s a woman like Geri right here in West Virginia. Lisa Minney, the founder of Two-Lane Livin’ for almost the same reasons started that. Let’s find out what Lisa has to say.
Lisa: About five years ago, I was working as the only newspaper reporter in a small community and I loved it a lot, but as times passed, the responsibilities of covering negative topics that came up – murder, misconduct, politics, things like that – they really began taking a toll on me. I was having trouble sleeping. I was angry. I couldn’t leave work at work. I was hardly ever home. After some time, I began looking for writing jobs that were not in the news field and interviewed for a couple of magazine jobs that also seem to include a lot of time in work and I was talking about one opportunity with my husband, Frank, and he just looked at me and he said if you’re going to do all that work, why not just do it for yourself?
Margaret Agard: Good thought, Frank. A man after my own heart. Go ahead.
Lisa: Yes and I looked at him and it never occurred to me and I said are you serious? He said of course I’m serious. Two months later, I quit my job and five months after that in September 2007, we released our first issue.
Margaret Agard: When you got started, did you have start up funds or were you able to get advertisers right away? How did you get going?
Lisa: We were fortunate. We had some start-up funds and so we didn’t have to look for any outside sources of funding other that what we had to our resources. Getting our first advertisers, you just hit the pavement. I think we pretty much called in every favor and every network and every contact that we had at the time. When we started, we were only in six counties and pretty much had a lifetime of contacts that we could work with from there and then we just kept growing and could reach out to other businesses and they’ve supported us. It was hard—
Margaret Agard: Where are you now and how many counties do you cover now?
Lisa: We’re now in 16 counties. It grew much faster in the first year that we ever expected. Our first issue was 10,000 copies and I had no idea if people would even read them or not and within a week, they were gone. The second issue went to 12,000 within the first year, we were at 14,000 and now we print 16,000 copies a month, 17,000 in the summer travel months.
Margaret Agard: How did you hope to make not just your life but everybody else’s lives better with this?
Lisa: To be honest, when we started, the topics that are covered in Two-Lane Livin’ were topics that Frank and I were interested in and we had people in our network and in our friends that were teaching us and when we launched the magazine, we believed, didn’t know for sure, that other people would want to know and learn these things just as much as we did. When Two-Lane Livin’ came out, immediately, it was obvious to us that there was a demand and people were interested in simplifying their lives and improving their health and growing their own food and becoming more self-sufficient.
Now, I think, today, we have 28 regular columnists. All of them were volunteers. None of them are paid. But they’re all passionate about their topic and they all have things that they want to share with readers and other people and—
Margaret Agard: Do you have any actually editing of those columns, Lisa?
Lisa: Not really. I don’t give any assignments. I figure the columnists know more about their topic than I do and I don’t really—
Margaret Agard: Well, I sent you a copy of this story I had about ringing the bell for the Salvation Army and a little girl who’s put all her money in it the last minute…and so I just said do you want this and if someone else had maybe a touching story or something, would you want them to contact you or you’re afraid that if I leave this in the show, you’ll get too many?
Lisa: We have a reader’s page so we always have space for small essays and so does poetry and things like that. We’re always open. We’re not here just to teach our readers, but we’re also here and hope to be a venue for an outlet for writers in the state.
Margaret Agard: How about recipes?
Lisa: We accept recipes. Readers love recipes.
Margaret Agard: I have a friend who has turtle fricassee made out of snapping turtle. I know. When she went through the steps, I said I’ll just come eat some of yours. I’m not ever.
Lisa: Right. We have two ladies that write regular recipe columns. We got one who just started. She started this month. All of her recipes use self-rising flour and then we’ve always had recipes for moms since the time we launched. Readers love that.
Margaret Agard: Really? Self-rising flour? Do you know hard it is to get that particular brand that everybody loves which now, I’ve forgotten the name of it. They already mix their biscuits out of. In fact, we were in the store one day and we got the last bag. I think when we’re leaving the aisle – I’m not making this up – this little, old lady, she looked like my mom, kind of bent over a little bit, was looking and we had taken the last bag. That’s what she was looking for and we felt so bad that we gave her our bag.
Lisa: That was nice.
Margaret Agard: I know, but isn’t that…it’s hard to find that. I don’t know that a series on those self-rising flour will work because then we’ll really won’t be able to find any. Tell me what you hear from people. Why do they like it?
Lisa: One of the common things that we’ve heard is that people, they like having something that they can read that’s not negative. People find comfort in it. A lot of people say they remember, it reminds them of something that they remember from their youth. With the younger generation, they find it empowering. A lot of them are – they’re wanting to learn to be self-reliant and they like learning how to garden and—
Margaret Agard: You know I was just reading an article, one of the women was writing and said when she was a young mom – she sure wished that the women, the way they talk about in Titus, about reaching out the older women should reach out and help the younger women, learn these things. I think we don’t realize how much they want it, how much they want to know. Like you said, you had people who are already teaching you, what kinds of things were they teaching you that were your first columnist?
Lisa: One of the things that we were learning at that time, I had a lady. She taught me how to get deal with our chickens. I’d never had chickens. I had never done any canning I had a small patio garden to get me the eight tomatoes out of the season but they taught me how to can, taught me how to sew, taught me how to dehydrate—
Margaret Agard: All the things that people used to learn when they lived on the farm and in a house where they did that but don’t anymore.
Lisa: Yes, common, practical common sense things that many of us really have no idea how to do.
Margaret Agard: I think sometimes, this is what I’ve noticed when we get together and we’re doing this as a group or we’re teaching the younger women how to do that stuff, is we have time to chat and then we talked about other things like my two-year-old is doing this and my husband says these things and we’re like uh-huh. Okay, that’s normal. You did not get the only child or husband who acts like that– how are you making it and how is it affecting your life? Is it making your life more stressful, less stress as you hoped or…?
Lisa: I was surprised to find that one of the hardest adjustments for me was kicking down a gear and can at a desk and I can assess every task that needs to be done on that desk but I found myself a little bit challenged when it came to dealing with the garden, dealing with the chicken. I had to find that farm routine which is very busy, again, and I don’t mean to say that it’s not a lot of work and it’s not a lot of hard work, but I just wasn’t in tuned to—
Margaret Agard: I’m going to do the laundry on Wednesday and…
Lisa: On Wednesday, the well goes or you can’t hang your clothes on the line and you can’t schedule the farm.
Margaret Agard: That’s right.
Lisa: The farm schedules you. That was a very hard adjustment for me. I was surprise by that. I thought, oh, this is going to be wonderful and I’m going to kick back and be a gardener and make my own bread and I found it challenging because I’m not in control of the weather and—
Margaret Agard: You got to learn to be happy not being in charge.
Lisa: Right. That’s the other part, learning to be happy and finding these little joys in the simple things.
Margaret Agard: Good point. Train yourself to find the joy in the little things, to find the good news, that’s the key to a happy life.
Male Speaker: You can find out more about how to have the joy that comes from living each day for God while still keeping up with daily life in the book, “In His Footsteps, How to be Happy in Every Situation” available at the website inhisfootsteps.com or online at amazon.com.
Margaret Agard: You can get more information on our guests and our discussion today including replays of the show at inhisfootsteps.com. Thanks for joining us today. I am Margaret Agard. You can reach me at P.O. Box 52 Fort McCoy, FL 32134 or through my website https://inhisfootsteps.com. I’m looking forward to hearing from you. Be sure to join us next week for more practical tips on living a God-directed life and amazing interviews with people who do.
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