Colorado Springs has two newspapers, the Gazette and the Independent, or the Indy for short. The Gazette is a daily and the Indy publishes weekly; the Gazette tends to take a conservative point of view while the Indy provides a more liberal perspective. I believe it's important to have two print news sources that balance each other out in this way, but recently we came perilously close to losing the Indy. The short story is that last year the Independent transitioned to a non-profit, and at the same time they rebranded and changed their name to Sixty Thirty-Five. I think the name change was an error in judgment, since of course they've been known as the Indy for decades -- why fix what isn't broken? Anyway, this didn't go over so well, but to complicate matters, they discovered a large debt that had been unaccounted for in the transition -- something to the tune of $300,000, if I recall correctly. What a disaster, especially for a non-profit!
Naturally this sparked a bit of a panic and immediate strategizing to remedy the situation. The first step was to unfortunately lay off most of their staff (this directly affected people that I know personally); fundraisers were held, a Go Fund Me was launched, debts were called in from delinquent advertisers, they reverted to their original name, business model adjustments were made, and so on. They're even printing their issues on smaller paper now, it seems. The fat has been trimmed as much as humanly possible. Thankfully all of this tweaking seems to have worked and they continue to publish weekly, as always.
For years the Indy has occupied a converted church on the corner of Nevada and Vermijo. I stopped by there a few days ago to ask for back copies to use as a biodegradable weed barrier in my gardens -- they always seem to print more than they need and are happy to give away old issues. As a regular donor, I didn't feel bad about asking, but I did feel bad when I saw that their offices are now vacant! I don't know if they've relocated or are simply without a home at the moment. I imagine this has been a very effective cost cutting measure, but it's sad to see their iconic old building sitting empty now.
2 comments:
Pretty sure each one has their own voice and spin on what they send out to their followers, especially if they want to keep them. Great post, thanks.
My city has several papers, but the two big ones are conservative and owned by the same chain, with a lot of the same content. The quality in the one I did buy kept going down, and so last year I gave up buying it. I just buy one from Toronto with a liberal mindset.
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