This holiday season, we’ve curated a gift bag that brings the best of small businesses in our coverage area to your doorstep.

By Matt Skoufalos | November 23, 2020 – (UPDATE: December 19, 2020)

What’s in the Bag?

Every Good News Bag includes a selection of gifts and goods from 23 local small businesses within our nine-town, Camden County coverage area.

We hope that, in addition to enjoying their offerings here, you will patronize them throughout the year. Small businesses are the lifeblood of our communities, and like all your neighbors, many have been hit particularly hard by circumstances of the past year.

These Earth-friendly, reusable totes were designed by Falco Print and Design, and screen-printed at The Factory in Collingswood. On one side of every one, you’ll find the names of six sponsoring organizations who helped this project become a reality. We thank them all for their contributions!

They are:

 

The gift list:

 

Our NJ Pen gift subscription insert cards were printed locally at Pronto Ship & Print of Collingswood (read more here). To redeem your three-month trial subscription (new readers only), please contact us with the new subscriber’s information and we’ll help you get set up.

Thanks for supporting The Good News Bag! For more background information, read on!

 What’s the Good News Bag project all about?

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash – https://bit.ly/2RnVmy7.

Back in February, NJ Pen won a competitive grant from the Center for Cooperative Media that was designed to bring us closer to the communities in our coverage area, and help grow our subscriber base as well.

The project we pitched was called “The Good News Box.”

It’s our riff on the curated subscription boxes that have become popular with shoppers and boutique brands in the past decade or so.

(If you’ve heard of Birchbox, Stitch Fix, or KiwiCo, you get the idea.)

There are so many vibrant small businesses in our Camden County coverage area—more than enough to fill a truckload of boxes—that we thought the opportunity to showcase them in a similar fashion would resonate with our readers.

And with our local economies having been throttled during the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, this project has become a more significant opportunity to boost some bottom lines when they could use it the most.

Originally, we wanted to host a pickup party for these curated boxes that would further celebrate the community spirit in which we deliver the news, but in-person gatherings aren’t the order of the day, so we’re bringing them to your doorstep instead.

We also shifted from the “Good News Box” to the “Good News Bag,” as New Jersey’s recent ban on single-use containers means you probably could use an extra earth-friendly, re-usable tote in the coming months.

Downtown Haddonfield. Credit: Matt Skoufalos.

Most importantly for us, every gift bag purchased includes a three-month trial subscription to NJ Pen, which may be activated for the e-mail address of your choice (new subscribers only).

You can give it as a gift or use it for yourself; it grants access to every news story we’ve written over the past six-and-a-half years.

We hope it will lead more folks to become full-time NJ Pen subscribers.

Readers who support this site financially provide the bulk of its bottom line at a time when ad revenues across all media are shrinking. Simply put: your investment in our work keeps us working for you.

Thanks for reading NJ Pen, and thanks for helping us share some of the best of what Camden County has to offer with the special people in your life!

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