Founder Jody Reese wanted to name the paper (then a website) something that would set it apart from other local papers in the area. Why did it have to have a traditional name? Why are newspapers called Sun, Telegraph, Tribune or Eagle anyway? In the age of the Internet, it didn't reason reasonable to be still calling newspaper what they were called 100 years ago. So after a search of more unusual newspaper names, such as The Other Paper and the Sacramento Bee, Jody fell upon Hippo. It wasn't an unusual name for him anyway. His mother ran an African art and craft store, called Giraffe the African Store, and Jody had been around rhinos, hippos and giraffes for most of his life, though in carved wood form only.

We have 400 street boxes spread throughout southern New Hampshire. Boxes can be found through the downtown areas of Manchester, Nashua, Concord, Milford and Derry. In addition the Hippo is available at all the Hannaford and Shaws supermarkets in southern New Hampshire as well as 800 additional retail and food service businesses.

Free works for our business model. We operate a bit like radio, broadcasting our papers out to people who want to pick it up for free and selling ads to advertisers that want to reach the people reading the paper.

There are two kinds of ads we run, display and classifieds. The display ads are the ones most businesses run advertising their product and services. These ads appear throughout the paper and are sold in modular sizes. Please visit our Advertising page for more information. To place an ad just give us a call at (603) 625-1855 and hit extension 26 to reach our sales manager Charlene Cesarini. We can design and build your ad for free.

Classified ads are the ones in the back of the paper and are generally apartments for rent, help wanted and other small items for sale. These are also called line ads, though larger ads can be purchased in the classified section, which is located in the paper of the paper. Call (603) 625-1855 and hit extension 25. If no one answers please leave a message. Our classified personnel handle other parts of our business and might be away from the desk or on another line. They will call you back. Or email: listings@hippopress.com

We print and distribute 44,000 copies. When they're out, they're out. We frequently run out at most locations by Saturday. We do add more papers to the supermarket locations on Mondays.

Please see our contact page for a complete list of how to reach our editor and reporters.

Generally we will not. Because the paper is focused on what will happen, so people can make use of the paper to find thing to do we put our resources into finding out and reporting on upcoming events. Send event information to listings@hippopress.com.

Generally we will not. Hippo covers food, arts, pop culture and other event related topics. We don't do business profiles unless that business is involved in one of our core coverage subjects, such as a cheese maker.

No. We don't barter ad sales for writing stories. We separate advertising from editorial for two important reasons. The first is that the singular job of the editorial department is to build a large and attractive audience (our readers) and to do that they need complete freedom to write about what they feel will get more people to read the paper. This benefits all advertisers because the larger the audience, the more people advertisers ads reach. We feel strongly that editorial must be completely independent from advertising to build a large and attractive audience. The second is that to be fair to all of our advertisers, large and small, we can't give special treatment in editorial to any of them. For us it's very important that all advertisers from our largest to our smallest are treated with respect and dignity. We feel strongly that to give our advertisers the most value we can, we need to build the largest audience and treat all advertisers the same. This way everyone wins.

Many times to publish lists of things to do or places to go and while we do the best we can we always forget something or some place. Many times we forget places that advertise with us. That's because our editorial department gives no preference to advertisers and forgets to mention them as often as they forget to mention a place that doesn't advertise. Please know it's not on purpose. It takes a huge team to put together the paper each week and though we strive to be perfect, we are not. If we do leave you out of a list please contact us and let us know. Usually in stories where we list a lot of thing or places we give a contact email address in case you were missed. Send an email to that address (if the story does not include one, email news@hippopress.com. We can't undo the mistake, but we can make sure we don't miss you in the future and depending on the subject, time of year and circumstances, publish an update to the list in the next issue.

Our editorial staff is prohibited from displaying any political affiliations, such as putting political bumper stickers on their vehicles or political lawn signs in their yards. Our editorial staff is headed by an editor who has complete discretion over specific editorial content. The publisher is not a member of the editorial department and does not pick and choose specific things to cover. The publisher, however, is involved in shaping general editorial policies, including what subjects and geographic areas to write about. We have no editorial board and do not - and never have - take political positions on candidates or community issues. The publisher does write a weekly "Publisher's Note" and this column reflects his views and not necessarily those of the rest of the ownership group or the editorial staff.