Typically, my Christmas wishes are simple. To spend time with the people I love. More time spent hiking and biking. A Rivian R1S. You know, nothing fancy.
But I’ve realized something over the past few years of running the paper. I am not my own boss.
I mean, I am in the fact that I constantly yell at myself when I screw up, and am always on my case for pushing deadlines, but ultimately, you are my boss.
You, the people reading this paper. More specifically, the people who contribute each week to making the paper viable.
And let’s face it, you guys are great bosses. You basically leave me alone to do what I want, every once in a while stopping me on the street to tell me how much you liked that story I wrote in the last paper, then explaining which story you meant, because I wrote all the stories in the last paper. (But not this one, oh no! I have two stories from other people!)
Your support is even more valuable as we move into the future.
Earlier this year, the Peace River Regional District—whose monthly full page ad was basically the anchor upon which the paper was built—decided that instead of advertising monthly, they were only going to advertise when something really important happened.
More recently, one of the smaller advertisers, whose been advertising with the Tumbler Ridge paper since back in the day that it was run by Loraine Funk and called Community Connections decided they were changing directions with their ad budget and would no longer be advertising with us.
My goal with the paper from day one was to try and get as much direct support from the people of the community as possible.
If I provided a valuable service, I thought, then people would contribute directly to keep that service going.
I didn’t want to charge for the paper, because I wanted everyone to have equal access to the news. But if a certain percentage of the population bought into the whole “this is valuable enough to pay for” theory, then I could keep doing the paper.
Unfortunately for the theory, the number of ads we got here at the paper was higher than what I was expecting, thanks to Lisa Allen, who has also been with RidgeLines since before it was RidgeLines.
Don’t get me wrong. I love our advertisers. The messages they get out in our paper (from support my business to here’s when garbage pick-up is happening). But the plan was never to have the paper completely supported by advertising, because if you become too reliant on any one advertiser, it becomes more difficult to write about them.
A decade ago, for instance, I wrote about how the new Chief Financial Officer for the District of Tumbler Ridge had got into trouble at her previous job for questioning the Chief Administrative Officer. I got an email from Tumbler Ridge’s then-CAO saying I was muck-racking and trying to stir stuff up, and that the District wasn’t going to advertise with the paper anymore.
Which was effectively the advertiser telling me what kind of stories that I could and couldn’t run.
(I was justified as, a few months later, they backed down on the no advertising thing, and then, a year later, the new CFO left due to questioning the CAO. The more things change… Also, note this story is told a more than a decade on, so details may or may not have happened as above. It’s an editorial. It’s allowed.)
Anyway. The whole hope of doing this was that I wanted the content to be beholden to the people of Tumbler Ridge, not to any one specific advertiser.
So, to that end, we are delivering the paper to everyone in town. Merry Christmas.
But I am also going to ask you for your support. If you think the paper is providing you with knowledge that you didn’t have before, and that being smarter is a good thing, then all we ask is you contribute.
Here’s the way it works normally: You can contribute as much or as little as you like, but contributing at least $3.50/issue allows us to hire a delivery being to bring the paper to your door. Of course, if you want to contribute more, you can.
If you contribute at least $7.50/issue, you become a co-publisher of the paper, and we’ll put your name in the list of contributers.
At $15/issue, we’ll get you one of our fancy staff tee-shirts. We don’t have staff tee-shirts yet, as nobody has contributed this much, but we can dream.
At $50/issue, you cease being a contributer, and become an advertiser. You’ll get 2.47X2 inches of space all to your lonesome that you can do whatever you want with. That goes up to a full page at $500/issue.
Those are our normal contribution levels, but in the spirit of Christmas, I thought I would offer you the chance to sponsor specific things.
Like, if you wanted to help keep me smart, you can donate $10/month-ish (most podcasts I listen to take contributions in American dollars, so this goes up or down, depending) to help support my podcast habit.
Or, if you wanted to help run the business side of things, contributing $27/month will cover the cost of the paper’s financial software subscription.
Looking to help out even more? The paper is put together using a combination of Adobe software: Lightroom, Photoshop, inDesign and (occasionally) Illustrator. It costs just under $80/month for a subscription to these programs.
And if you wanted to make the monthly payments on a new Rivian R1S so I could deliver the papers in style? Well….
But if you aren’t able to contribute cash? That’s okay, too. The paper is distributed free of charge downtown for all. If you want to contribute in other ways, I always love when people submit stories, or story ideas or pictures for parting shots, or write letters to tell me about all the mistakes I made last issue.
That’s it for now. See you in January!
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.
