Photograph by George Sakkestad
Bay Area Parent managing editor Mary Brence Martin checks pages before sending them to the printer.
By Sue Fagalde Lick
When Sandy Moeckel's children were small, there weren't any local newspapers that gave advice for parents. So she started one.
Kids Kids Kids began in 1983 as an eight-page publication that people mistook for a PTA bulletin or church newsletter. These days, Moeckel's creation is called Bay Area Parent and averages about 100 pages a month. Several sister publications have joined it along the way, including Bay Area Baby, Education and Enrichment Guide, Childcare & Preschool Finder and The Valley Parent in Contra Costa County. A new publication for parents of teens is scheduled to debut this fall.
Moeckel, an artist and teacher, produced Kids Kids Kids in her Los Gatos home with a friend. They wrote all the stories, shot the photographs and laid out the paper, using the sunlight coming through the windows in lieu of a light table.
The first few months were a struggle. Her friend left, but Moeckel kept going, building Bay Area Parent into one of the most widely read publications in the Bay Area.
From Moeckel's home, the company, dubbed Bay Area Publishing Group, moved first to offices on Los Gatos Boulevard and later to Alberto Way. Moeckel said that space has become too small, so they may move again next year.
The early '80s were a good time to start a parenting newspaper, Moeckel said, a touch of her native Alabama still in her speech as she reminisced in her sunlit office. A new baby boom was under way, bringing children's shops, specialized classes for children and courses in parenting that went beyond how to bathe a baby and explored serious social issues.
Her own children were 3 and 5, and Moeckel sought resources to help raise them. Nothing was being published, she said. "Children and family was a little like mentioning the body parts between the navel and the thighs. It's there, but we just don't talk about it."
Considered an older parent at 29, she and her peers were interested in every aspect of child development. Such tidbits as when a baby could grasp something, why they cried and whether the music they heard as infants would impact the kind of music they liked later in life fascinated them. They also needed to know how to find day care, which parks were good for toddlers and which stores could accommodate strollers.
Moeckel and her friend started doing research and were anxious to share what they learned. "There was a genuine desire to make this information available to other people and to share the joy and celebration of parenting, rather than having it just be sort of an exercise in life."
They called the newspaper Kids Kids Kids, but after three years, Moeckel changed the name to Bay Area Parent. "Kids Kids Kids was really cute, really memorable, but that was not who should be picking it up and reading it. People thought that it was a publication for kids," she said.
"Because we were sort of inventing the industry as we went, we had the time to make mistakes and correct them," Moeckel added. "In today's fast-moving media world, you don't have that luxury."
When Bay Area Parent started, the country had only three other regional parenting publications, based in Seattle, Los Angeles and Berkeley. Today, the United States has 125 parenting newspapers. Moeckel, a board member for four years of the Parenting Publications of America, was recently elected president of that organization.
It's one of the few groups to which she devotes time outside of her work. "I feel like I can have a major impact there. Sometimes on some of the other groups I can't," she said.
"I personally have to make a decision. Am I going to sit on the board for all these organizations, or am I going to take the time and do homework with my kids?" she added.
Publisher members of PPA meet twice a year, once in July in Chicago for three days and again in January for about five days in various locations. One of the values is meeting other publishers. "There's not another publisher in this company," Moeckel explained. "That's about the only place that you can really exchange direct information."
Focus on working parents
PPA is studying ways to help working parents juggle their two jobs. They plan to designate the most family-friendly corporations in America. "I think most parents are in the workplace today. Making that work is what's going to make families work," Moeckel said.
Bay Area Publishing has always been a family-friendly place to work. Most of the employees are parents, and nearly all have flex-time so they can be available for their children when needed. When she interviews potential employees, Moeckel said she tells them, "We don't pay you more than everybody else, but we probably create a better workplace for you."
The staff numbers approximately 25 now, including numerous part-timers. Lynn Berardo, a Saratoga resident who started as a writer, moved up to managing editor and is now associate publisher, handles many of the administrative duties. Managing editor Mary Brence Martin, a longtime Los Gatan, oversees a staff calendar for editor/reporters and a network of freelance writers.
Advertising salespeople, graphic artists and circulation staff round out the crew. Three people work out of a branch office for The Valley Parent in Dublin.
Each issue begins several months ahead with a planning meeting in Moeckel's office, attended by Moeckel, Berardo, Martin, two regular feature writers, the calendar editor and an intern from San Jose State University.
Martin comes armed with ideas she has gathered from readers, freelance submissions, other publications and trends that she has spotted, and they brainstorm until they come up with enough articles to fill the paper.
The stories are then assigned to writers. Meanwhile, material for the current issue is coming in, being edited and going to the graphics department to be married with photos, drawings and advertisements. The sales staff turns in ads on computer disks, sorted by publication and category. Moeckel figures out the order of the pages in Bay Area Parent, and Berardo does the same for Valley Parent. Finally, proofs are made, checked and sent to the printer.
Bay Area Publishing has become highly computerized, Moeckel said, noting that her son Peter, now college age, is their computer and technical adviser. Each writer and salesperson has a computer workstation, and almost everything is sent to the printer on disk, as opposed to the old-fashioned system of pasting strips of paper on blue-lined sheets of cardboard. Only Bay Area Parent goes through pasteup, and that will change soon.
Bay Area Parent is still the biggest paper in the chain. Several years ago, the company started The Valley Parent in the East Bay.
Bay Area Baby, another outgrowth of Bay Area Parent, is filled with information for parents of infants. New annual publications from Bay Area Publishing are the Education and Enrichment Guide and the Childcare & Preschool Finder. Updated annually, both
are compact resources for parents.
In the early 1990s, the company also ventured into the home and garden market with Bay Area Homestyle. A slick publication with many admirers, it turned out to cost more than it earned. Moeckel admitted the company dropped $200,000 before deciding to cease publication.
"You have to try things. You have to be willing to take a risk. If you're not, you're not going to make it," she said.
The latest publication on the horizon is a newsletter for parents of teens, a natural since Moeckel's, Berardo's and Martin's children are all teenagers now. In fact, Martin said, they sometimes need to pass ideas by the younger parents in the office because they're not in the midst of parenting any more.
Bay Area Parents of Teens will start out small. Unlike the other publications, which are distributed free at schools, doctors' offices, stores and other places where parents gather, the teen publication will be offered by paid subscription only. There simply aren't the same kinds of places for parents of teens to get together, Martin explained.
They will need about 2,000 subscriptions to break even, Moeckel said, and she's keeping her fingers crossed. "We'll just sort of put it out there. It will be one of those things that will pay off in three or five years, probably.
"Having two teens myself, I so strongly know that the needs are so great, and parents of teenagers are so cut off from the ability to communicate with each other. And the issues are so much bigger; they're life and death issues."
From the beginning, Moeckel has been a woman with a mission. Not only did she want to share information, but she was anxious to make people see that parenting is the most important job they can undertake.
Trade journal for parents
She compared Bay Area Parent to a trade journal. "Bay Area Parent is a professional resource for a parent, and I wanted it to look and feel the same as the Wall Street Journal or the various computer magazines. I felt if it looked the same in design and presentation, then you'd feel better about your job, and the public would perceive the job as important.
"I'm probably most proud of the fact that I really do feel like we have elevated parenting to the point of being just as important as a career or anything else," she said.
The quality of the paper has improved over the years, Moeckel said, but she still agonizes over stories they should have done or could have done better.
Occasionally Bay Area Parent has gone to bat for favorite causes, including endorsing candidates in recent elections. One of the paper's accomplishments, together with the nonprofit organization CONTACT, was getting a warm line, a nonemergency help line, started for latchkey kids.
But most of the time, staffers have been too busy putting out the paper to become directly involved. "We put parents together, we keep issues out there, we facilitate communication," Moeckel said.
Parents today face many of the same issues as Moeckel and her peers did. However, there are some differences. Among them is the ethnic diversity in the Bay Area now, something they try to cover and take advantage of by sharing different methods of parenting. "We're exposed to a lot of styles and a lot of things here in Santa Clara County that we can make the most of," Moeckel said.
Parents also seem more fearful for the safety of their children. In the neighborhood where Moeckel used to live, there are bars on the windows. Parents are afraid to let their kids run free and have called for removal of teeter-totters, swings and other equipment where their kids might get hurt. "Everyone's afraid of getting sued," she said.
Bay Area Parent and its sister papers have hit on controversial topics, from questioning how children are taught to read to how to keep kids from shoplifting. But it's the day-to-day advice that is their strength, Moeckel said.
Just as her children have grown and become independent, so has Bay Area Publishing. "It can function just fine without me," she said. She is proud to have created a business that is strong enough that she could walk away and it would keep going.
These days, unlike in the beginning, she has time for vacations and her favorite hobbies, including traveling, gardening, and skiing.
About the time Bay Area Parent was born, Moeckel and her family were beginning to renovate their home. That project is finally about done, she said. A little more molding, a little more paint, and they can call the project complete.
If Moeckel had to do it over again, she wouldn't have tried to start a newspaper, rebuild a house and raise two kids all at the same time. She has managed to do all three and isn't finished yet.
This article appeared in the Los Gatos Weekly-Times, July 17, 1996.
©1996 Metro Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved