Ten founding partners. Then the door closes.

The homepage and the daily email are the front of the house — and there, you're the only one in your category. If you're the founding insurance agency, no other insurance agency appears on the homepage or in the 6 AM email while you hold your seat, and you hold it for as long as you stay a partner. Other businesses in your category can sponsor individual town pages or features later at the standard rate — but the seat every reader sees first is yours. And if you ever give it up, the next business in your category on the waitlist takes it.

You tell us what you want the county to know — a special, an event, a new hire, or just your story — and our team writes it, designs it, and publishes it from The Current's Facebook page to the thousands of county residents who follow us. Every post is clearly labeled as a paid partnership with your business (that's both Meta's rule and ours), and you approve the partnership once with a single tap when you join. Then we put real ad budget behind each post, targeted to adults in and around Shiawassee County, so it reaches well past our followers. You never log into anything.

Three reasons. We run Meta promotion for our own page every single day, so we know what this county actually clicks on and what it costs — we've grown our page from a few hundred followers to thousands in ten weeks doing exactly this. Your post starts from a page your customers already follow and trust, instead of cold. And 100% of the ad budget in your plan is real Meta spend — the management is included in the flat rate, so none of your budget disappears into fees.

It's a professionally written story about your business — your history, your people, what you do — published as its own permanent page on shiawassee.news and shared to our Facebook audience. Because it lives on a news site, Google indexes it: when someone searches your business name, a well-written article about you appears in the results, linking to you. Most local businesses pay an agency $300–500 for a page like this. Founders get it included, published launch week.

Three places: your partner tile on the homepage (every partner the same size — a founding pizza shop looks exactly as good as a founding bank), your listing on our Partners page with a link to your website or Facebook, and your name rotating in the Morning Current, the daily 6 AM email.

Every month you get a plain-English report of real numbers: how many actual human readers visited, and where your placements appeared. We filter out bots, web crawlers, even our own monitoring systems — if the number says 1,400 readers, it was 1,400 people. No other outlet in this county will show you that. If the numbers ever aren't worth it to you, you cancel — that's the deal.

The badge marks the ten businesses that backed local news before it was proven. It stays on your listing permanently — including years from now, when the audience is many times this size and new advertisers pay standard rates. It's the difference between being a customer and being part of the founding story.

$100/month for Partner, $300/month for Partner + Reach — card on file, cancel anytime with an email or text. No contract, no cancellation fee, no auto-renewal tricks. The 12-month lock protects you: your rate can't go up during it. Prepay a year and get two months free. The only thing that expires is founding pricing itself — when the seats are taken, new advertisers pay $200 and $400.

No — and that's a feature. Our reporting isn't for sale, which is exactly why being next to it means something. Partners sponsor pages and features; the Partner Spotlight is clearly labeled as sponsored. If your business makes real news, our newsroom covers it the same as anyone's. That separation is what keeps readers trusting the site your name is on.