It’s incredibly fitting that our cover this edition in print included a sign that reads: stop ahead. It’s important to note you don’t stop at a stop sign forever, it’s a momentary pause. Whether to think or to ensure your safety and sustainability, it’s a pause before you continue going down the road you were on (or perhaps you’re turning at that stop sign and trying something new?) .
It’s apt because our print edition needs to pause. It’s become clear through rising costs, injuries, the struggles of growing, manpower and resources (and so much more) that we need to regroup so we can build out, while reducing our overhead. We’ve gotten wonderful offers from talented individuals in the community to help us, and we haven’t had a chance to properly engage with them and their talents — among the dozens of other projects we’re working on and admin to be done. We recognize that we have to do better — sometimes caring too much is paralyzing and overwhelming (and all of a sudden you’re buried under 2000 emails when the local journalism landscape changes).
Don’t worry, we are first and foremost a newspaper — in the very literal sense. We are putting a tentative restart date of after summer. It’s not ideal, especially during the busy season. But it’s what we need to do to be able to recalibrate. We are not cutting services, the community calendar and our journalism will continue, we are pausing our print product in an effort to provide more services and on a more solid footing. We are doing what we need to do and we are doing what we can.
We often in these updates state the formative quote that hangs in our newsroom: “first make it work, then make it work better”. It’s clear to us that we need a more solid footing in order to actually make it work — or as the constructive and welcome advice of a subscriber gave more bluntly: “If you can’t get the small things right, then you have no business doing the big things” — we agree, and there are so many big things we want to do, but we certainly haven’t gotten the small things right yet.
There’s so much good and informational content we have to hold or cut each edition (including this edition), with much of it never making it to readers as it becomes no longer timely and we’re too exhausted or too busy to put it on our website. During this pause — after catching our breath (which won’t happen until after we attend the Association of Alternative News Media Publishers convention the second week of July) — you will actually likely see more content, both original and from our friends and partners, published through our channels.
While we may shuffle around some of our columns, many of our current writers will not be changing and we will seek to expand what we cover and engage in new ways.
Often the overhead and creative energy required of a print product (plus the literal limitations of page count) limited our ability to do as much journalism as we wanted to do. We believe the journalism we do has often been of great depth and usefulness to the community (just ask Arena), but we want to do more. We want to bring on more writers. We want to host more interns and teach the next generation of journalists. We want to launch a nonprofit that studies independent local journalism models and incubates publications like ours, especially as news deserts loom. We want to be able to teach the difference between first person observations and news, between good information and misinformation and malinformation. We want to help our community think critically (and grow) in a time where our democratic society is under threat.
We recently saw this quote by a news publisher named James Preston Allen:
“In the worst of times a vigilant press is essential to the freedom of thought and expression in a free democratic society. In the best of times, it is informative, entertaining and thought provoking.”
We need to be ready and resilient to prepare for our job and role in the worst of times, while doing our part to contribute to the best of times.
We will slowly transition in the coming weeks, putting stories online on our website as they are edited and ready to publish. We will then start with a bi-weekly email newsletter round-up that will function as our editions during this pause. We’re excited to engage with our 500+ strong opt-in email list in a way we haven’t before — including giving businesses the opportunity to reach our readers through online, social and email ads as well. No one else has the reach we have digitally and we’re excited to build out in that space. If you haven’t already, now is the time to sign up for our email newsletter on our website. If we don’t have your email, please send it along.
We appreciate the support we’ve gotten from every one of our readers, subscribers and community members — especially when seeing that 20%+ of respondents on our Best of the River Valley reader poll indicated they were interested in helping develop local, independent journalism and wanted to know how they could help us succeed. We will be undertaking the development of recurring membership opportunities that help you engage with us and our community, while supporting independent, local journalism. If you are interested, please let us know.
We also understand that there will be those that don’t understand or are unable or unwilling to engage with our journalism digitally while we take this pause. We’re happy to talk with you about solutions, please reach out. Ultimately, if a solution cannot be found then we are happy to pause your subscription upon request and restart it when we restart our print editions.
For all others that will maintain their subscriptions, thank you! We truly appreciate your support. Along with our near-future recurring membership opportunities, we hope to start a press club for our subscribers and supporters with various benefits. We’re looking for your ideas as well! As we’ve shared recently as well, after we catch our breath, we plan to do events where you can sit down with us and our contributors and staff and discuss news and the community — and have our press club and members stick around after and help us figure out to best cover our community (whether that be topics, methods, model or help us write policy on how to integrate and disclose AI use, etc.).
Once again, we’re your community newspaper and we are what you make us. We will continue to build out, but we can’t do it without you. Without your support, your ideas, your contributions, your caring and more.
We’ll see you in print again.
