Editorial
Editorial:
Looking Good, Dying By Inches
The Pride issue of Out in the Mountains looks really good. The content is fabulous, and there’s lots of ads. We’re entertaining and informative, passionate, sometimes warm and fuzzy.
But we’re dying by inches. By August, the paper you’re holding will be three inches shorter. It’s equivalent to slashing the content by four pages – not the ads, just the articles.
Cutting the page size saves just over $300 a month.
We’re bleeding $1500 a month in red ink. We don’t know where the other $1200 a month will come from.
We’re too small to get national advertising. Fundraising is flat. Grants are harder to come by. Fewer Board volunteers means fewer grants get written.
By the end of this year, there will either be no more OITM, or it will return to being a newsletter, a very pale shadow of the issue you’re looking at today.
Unless you help.
If you care whether OITM survives:
Write: a letter or an email (I volunteer to...)
a check
a grant
Ask: your friends
your family
your company
your neighborhood businesses
to support your newspaper.
Then, next month ask again whether they’ve bought subscriptions, written their (tax-deductible) checks, invested in advertising. Ask yourself if you can spend some time on the Board, raising funds, writing grants, finding the money to keep us going.
And if you don’t care whether OITM survives, tell us, so we can die with dignity.
Euan Bear