Monday, July 30 — Well, folks, we’re pretty well out of excuses. We may have to get into the habit of posting something here on a daily basis. That is not to say that we intend to run a normal sort of a blog here. Not if a blog is expected to provide daily flashes of brilliance that move the public dialogue forward and demonstrate the author’s superior intellect.
All we really plan to do here is make one point, over and over again: in this fairly desperate time, when our already imperfect democracy is in imminent danger of going completely to hell for good, the reality-based community is begging to lose if they don’t take up the tools that are right in front of them, and create their own class of newspapers – the most cost-effective, versatile, flexible, utilitarian, user-friendly self-defensive weapon available to us in the information war that we are still losing.
Naturally, since we publish a little-bitty sixteen-page tabloid paper once a fortnight, and give it away, we think that’s just about the right format and frequency for these papers. But there’s more to our recommending these specifications than mere self-regard.
Size and Cost – The smaller a paper is, the cheaper it is to print – down to a point, anyway. A single copy of our sixteen tabloid-size page costs us all of ten cents to print. Think about that for a minute. The next time you pay a dime to make a single-sided Xerox (r) copy, tell yourself, “I could have printed a newspaper.”
Frequency – We publish every other Friday. That gives us two whole weeks to assemble, proof, distribute, and mail the paper. If we tried to do it every week, we’d have burned out long ago. From the reader’s point of view, it comes out often enough so they don’t forget us, and not so often that they can’t find time to read the whole thing.
Cover Price – As a publisher of another free paper told us once, “A cover price is a bar to readership.” We give our paper away, not because we don’t think it has worth, but because we want everyone to read it. And you might be amazed to see who does. Retired people, young people, straight people, bent people, rich people, poor people – all kindsa people. Best of all, because we distribute it free in local pizza joints and coffee shops, people of all political stripes pick it up. Our most important readers are the ones who don’t agree with us – and we’ve got ‘em.
Portability – Our combination of low cost and small size gives us the analog world’s equivalent of the quality the online world calls “viral.” Someone sees something that they like, they grab five copies, and hand them to five friends. Try that with the Sunday Times.
Editorial Control – A vast amount of whining gets done about the difficulty of lobbying huge media corporations for fair treatment. Well, of course. It is difficult. The vast task of attempting to correct these spewers of disinfotainment must continue for the forseeable future. Just don’t ask us to do it. We’re having far too much fun playing on a field of our own creation. We own the bat, the ball, the bases, the umps, and the beer concession.
It may be just a coincidence that New Hampshire’s First Congressional District, which threw out a Bush-supporting Republican incumbent last fall, and elected a Democrat who pledged to work for “the bottom 99 percent of us,” is also home to our newspaper. Then again, it may not. We don’t know. Nobody knows.
But we believe this: if there were 435 other papers in this country, built along the same lines as ours, one in every congressional district, Congress might stand a chance of being the peoples’ house again some day.