Writing a regular monthly column for whichever edition of the Town Crier covers your area is a great way to promote your charity, service or business at no cost to you - apart from the creative effort of writing a column each month.
The deal is the columnist provides each month an interesting, engaging, informative or helpful article and in exchange for this receives free promotion. The article should not be just an advertorial but actually present tips, advice, "how-to" and so on that help the reader. Or actually engage and entertain. There is no better way of promoting what you do than demonstrating your competence and knowhow via monthly tips, advice and information.
You can apply via email to become a columnist and I'll agree to it if I can see that what you have to offer is of benefit to our readers - but please don't lose heart if I turn you down as my decision will be based on what's best for the magazine, whether the subject matter is already covered by another columnist, whether we already have a sufficient number of columns running and so on an so forth.
Usually a columnist becomes columnist because I have reached out and invited them to do so.
A monthly column can be any length up to about 600 words and should be accompanied by a few nice images, your contact details and so forth. To keep your column, you'd just need to submit one article for each monthly issue.
Once again, I'm now clarifying what is meant by "local": your business, service or enterprise counts as local if (a) the businesses' proprietor(s) live in the area covered by the magazine and/or (b) the business' office address is within the area covered by the magazine.