B.J. Frazier, the owner of Coastal Fun Info LLC, publishers of The Bluffton Sun, The Hilton Head Sun and The Sun City Sun (S.C.) community newspapers – and their digital platforms – has announced the sale of those properties to Kevin Aylmer, president of Lowcountry Local Media.

For the last year, the leadership of the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association has been working to develop a strategic plan to guide our organization.

Through our work with SNPA's executive committee, staff, board members and Max Strategy Consultants, who helped guide us, I firmly believe we have developed a roadmap to make SNPA a better organization and, most importantly, more valuable to its members.

Now we need your help.

The board has begun working on these issues, but we would like for members to be part of planning and executing our strategy.

We've identified four major areas that we'd like to focus on as part of our plan:

SNPA is working with the News Media Alliance to raise awareness about the importance of real news produced by trusted news organizations that employ high-quality, investigative journalists. The second phase of the national campaign begins today.

In David Letterman style (but with two additional items), Tom Yunt sent attendees at the SNPA-Inland Annual Meeting home with a dozen ideas that will drive revenue for their newspapers. Ninety-nine percent of what he talked about was focused on the core product – print; not digital. Yunt is COO of United Communications Corporation, Kenosha, Wisc., which publishes the daily Kenosha News, two additional dailies, several weeklies and several television stations.

Brainworks Software, LLC has announced a new partnership with Interlink's True Newspaper Mail, an industry-leading cloud-based presort mailing system.

One group of 41 publications, currently using Brainworks' CircSmart management software, switched to True Newspaper Mail resulting in an annual postage savings of $185,000, while improving their delivery and gaining access to newspaper mailing expertise.

Benchmarking helps newspaper management set goals, track success or failure, and provide objective standards for comparison, publishers heard during a session at the SNPA-Inland Annual Meeting led by Dolph Tillotson, president of Southern Newspapers Inc., and Tim Prince, vice president of Boone Newspapers and publisher of the Shelby County Reporter in Columbiana, Ala.

During this session, Tillotson shared a six-page handout offering the statistical analysis calculations that SNI uses, and he also is offering a blank Excel spreadsheet that can be used by other companies that want to implement something similar.

Last week, E&P sent many in our industry an e-mail with a link to a column. The subject line read: "E&P Exclusive: Newspapers Should Be Transparent About Their Financial Challenges."

It made some claims that the industry isn't being fully truthful about our finances with a few suggestions on how to do it better by someone who left newspapers a decade ago.

I crafted a reply – which you can read here – with the help of a few SNPA board colleagues. My thought was "Wouldn't 'Editor and Publisher' (emphasis added) like to hear the viewpoint of ... say ... a publisher?"

Boy, was I wrong.

As Republicans head to the polls today for the nationally watched runoff election between U.S. Senate candidates Luther Strange and Roy Moore, PolitiFact has focused its Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-checking forces on Alabama.

But its mission isn't only about sorting out who's telling the truth and who isn't in the primary contest to replace Jeff Sessions, now U.S. attorney general. PolitiFact is researching what people think about the organization itself and other news media outlets in some of the politically reddest places in the country: Mobile, Ala.; Tulsa, Okla.; and Charleston, W.Va. The goal is to improve credibility all around.

The Associated Press has announced an effort to enhance its fact-checking and ability to debunk misinformation with $245,000 from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

With the funding, AP will add additional full-time journalists dedicated to fact-checking and integrate local news fact checks into APNews.com and the AP News app.

ZipRecruiter and GateHouse Media have announced a partnership that makes ZipRecruiter the exclusive recruitment advertising partner for GateHouse Media. The partnership, which will launch Oct. 1 in more than 550 markets across the U.S., will power GateHouse recruitment pages – online and in print – that reach more than 21 million readers every week.