Fully Utilize Free Local Community Newspapers to Promote Dafa

By a Dafa practitioner in Germany

(Clearwisdom.net) In many cities of Germany, there is a kind of free weekly local community newspaper with advertisements and news. Such free newspapers are left in different places for local people to take or are put into the people's mailboxes (with permission). Such newspapers are usually about local people or local activities in addition to advertisements, such as information about second-hand goods markets, employment opportunities, and notification of seminars, etc. Therefore, people like to read them. I think we should fully make use of such community newspapers to promote Dafa and clarify the truth.

One reporter from a community newspaper in the city where I live searched on the internet and found Falun Gong websites. He got in touch with me and interviewed me for the paper. When he learned that I offered free classes to teach Falun Gong exercises, he included this information in his report, as well as other parts from my interview, and other information about Falun Gong. Then he published this article, including pictures and the Falun Emblem as the top story on the first page of his newspaper. This attracted a lot of attention and consequently many predestined people found Dafa.

I feel that such community newspapers provide the following favorable conditions for promoting Dafa:

1. It only reports local news and because it has a close relationship with local people's lives, a lot of people like to read it. Small pieces of news published in major newspapers often don't attract much attention. However, the same news may be considered important in a community newspaper and get published on the front page.

2. Such free newspapers sometimes have even larger circulations than the newspapers that people formally subscribe to. The primary readers of community newspapers include housewives, laborers, and sales assistants, etc. These people don't frequently read major newspapers. Hence, if we only pay attention to clarifying the truth to the major newspapers but ignore these small newspapers, then these people may not have as many chances to know Dafa.

From this experience, I have come to think that when we have Falun Gong Information Days, SOS RescueWalks and other such activities, we can inform the journalists of the local community newspapers in that area before the event. Since they only report local news, they probably don't have a lot of interesting things to write about, especially in small cities. In this case, if we can inform them ahead of time, they may be interested in attending. The effects of the report published in my local community newspaper has proven to be very good. More than 60 people came to learn the exercises in 4 weeks. Even more unexpected was that when I promoted Falun Gong in my local area, if I mentioned the exercise teaching activities and that report, then people would be interested immediately. I often meet these kinds of people when promoting Dafa. They say that they have been hearing about Falun Gong and they now have a clearer understanding after reading the community newspaper report.
Chinese version available at http://minghui.cc/mh/articles/2001/11/17/19803.html

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