A local Athens tourist attraction may soon see an increase in visitors if a national magazine's promotional campaign is successful.
The Dairy Barn will be featured in the April edition of National Geographic Traveler magazine as one of 356 Appalachian regional attractions. It will promote tourism in the region in a map guide to Appalachia.
The guide is an insert highlighting historical or cultural tourist sites unique to the Appalachian area, which was placed in almost one million copies of Traveler along with a full-length article about the region, said Mike Hogan, Ohio Department of Development spokesman.
The Appalachian region consists of parts of Alabama, Kentucky, Georgia, Maryland, New York, Mississippi, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia and all of West Virginia.
An additional 300,000 maps were printed to distribute in schools, libraries and tourism centers, Hogan said. Twenty-two of the attractions are in Ohio and include places such as the Hock Hocking-Adena Trail, Serpent Mound, President Grant's birthplace and the Jackson Apple Festival.
Supplementing the publication is a companion site linked to the National Geographic Web site, which receives about 5 to 7 million hits a month (www.nationalgeographic.com/appalachia).
The site will feature additional articles, an interactive map and links through the Appalachian Regional Commission to individual states' tourism Web sites. The link also will serve the ARC as an instrument to measure the success of the project by counting the number of hits the site receives.
This undertaking is not without a price tag. The map inserts cost about $85,000 and a one-year link on National Geographic's Web site will cost an additional $100,000, Hogan said. A grant from the ARC is funding the project.
Appearing in National Geographic is a large step into the public eye for the center, because most advertising is done by word-of-mouth, said Andrea Lewis, Dairy Barn executive director.
The added attention is expected to bring more day-trippers into Athens
affect admissions to exhibitions and improve the economy of the area she said.
According to the ARC's Web site, www.arc.gov, tourism in Ohio accounted for almost 60,000 jobs and had an economic effect of more than $2 billion in 2001.
National Geographic selected the attractions from a list of more than 1,000 locations and events believed to represent authentic Appalachia Hogan said.
Established in 1978, the Dairy Barn is a nonprofit cultural art center that has deep roots in the Athens area, at the same time drawing travelers from different states for its impressive exhibitions, Lewis said.
The center is funded through fund-raisers, donations and memberships. Two corporate sponsors of the center are the Ohio Arts Council and the Martha Holden Jennings Foundation, which help pay for the educational programs offered by the center, Lewis said.
The center's expenditures in 2003 were about $440,000 and yearly revenue was about $400,000, according to the organization's IRS 990 report.
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