The questions we get.

No. Nothing about this touches them digitally. They get an object in the mail with their name on it. The only people using a phone are the ones sending photos and stories in, by text, by email or through Paper Route.

However they already do. Reply to our text with a photo, a few words or a voice note; email the magazine's own contribution address; add it at app.paper-route.com; or send it from an AI assistant such as Claude. Voice notes are turned into words for the page. More on how it works.

Subscribe and finish setup by the 15th of a month, and the first issue lands in the first week of the month after. Do both on the 12th of September and it arrives in early October; leave setup until the 20th and it's the first week of November instead. The gap isn't padding — questions go out to your family at the start of the month, the answers come back through it, and the issue is printed and posted on the 27th. Miss that and there's nothing to print. Every issue after the first one arrives in the first week of its month, with nothing for you to do.

No. It works for anyone who'd rather have a printed record of their life than a feed of it — someone living far from the people they love, a person recovering from something long, a family that wants a proper account of a year instead of nine thousand photos nobody opens. We're starting with families looking after a parent because that's where the need is sharpest and the alternative is worst: the person who most wants the news is the one least able to reach it. Everything here works the same whoever it's addressed to.

Making one for a parent or grandparent

We do, from what family and friends send. Someone in the family proofs every issue for names and faces before it prints.

That's the whole thing we built. One question, to one person, about one specific thing, answerable in thirty seconds without opening an app. If someone goes quiet two months running we stop asking them and ask you for another name instead.

It doesn't invent facts and it never guesses who's in a photograph. It takes what people actually send and sets it in the house voice. Names, dates and relationships come from you and from the person who sent the photo. You can read any issue before it prints.

We write them. Results and standings are facts, so we pull those from a sports data feed and put them in a box that can be read at a glance. The news pages and the hometown page get written in plain sentences from what actually happened that month. We don't reprint articles and we don't run photographs we don't have the right to run.

That's who we built it for. Captions are written as statements, never as quizzes, so there's nothing in the issue anyone can fail. Everyone is named every time with their relationship attached. One page is written for whoever is sitting with them rather than for the reader, and it's the page care staff use most.

The issue still ships at twenty-four pages. Roughly half of it doesn't depend on anybody replying: whatever they follow, the news pages, the hometown page, the era feature and the recurring pages all get built from the dossier you gave us at setup. Family photos are the part we have to ask for, and a thin month there just means the other pages run longer.

Not yet, but it's the request we get most. For now one person subscribes and everyone else contributes for free. Split it however you like on your end.

Yes, any time. Email [email protected] and we'll cancel it — no questions asked, and on an annual plan we refund the unused whole months.

Every past issue stays in your account, the subscriber's, with what was in it, who sent what, and when it was posted. Contributors see only what they sent themselves.