Dear reader,
If you subscribe to our daily newsletter or look at the ads on our website, then you’ll know that we’ve recently launched an end-of-year drive to double the number of our monthly donors to 1,000 by the end of 2021. That means we want to welcome 500 new monthly donors to our Press Club over the next few weeks. It’s a tall order, but we think we can do it, because we think you feel how we do about local journalism—that it’s vital, that it should be free, and that it should be sustainable.
In the daily newsletter this week, we’ve worked to give readers and current and prospective Press Club members a glimpse into our operations—a look at what your dollars already do, or could do, to support us.
We’ve covered transparency, and how it’s one of the core tenets of journalism in that it reflects the relationships we have as journalists between all of our sources and the audiences to whom we bring news and content. We mentioned our code of ethics, and how we always try to disclose conflicts of interest when they arise in our work.
We also talked about the firewall between our sales and editorial teams (and between our editorial teams and Press Club donors). Editorial staff (including INDY editors) don’t know who our Press Club donors are unless they tell us.
We also operate completely independently of any commercial or political sponsors (people, groups, and businesses who pay for ads in our newspaper or digital products). While we are committed to advancing progressive ideals in our news and culture reporting—and our writers are free to a large degree to editorialize in their work to that end—the INDY is not affiliated with any political party, PAC, community organization, or any other group. We’re independent.
Finally, this week, we discussed one of the most important reasons to support free local journalism through the Press Club, and that is that the dollars that you donate stay local—all that money goes to support a local operation, which pays local writers and editors, creatives and designers, photographers, managers, distributors, publishers, and others who work hard to keep our communities informed.
In collaboration with our friends at BlueLena, whose software we use to produce all of our newsletters and other email correspondence, we calculated that it costs about $1,000 to produce a story here at the INDY.
Our staff writers are responsible for producing one story for print each week—a news story or longer feature—and several blog posts on top of that. I’ll tell you that none of them make $52,000 per year, though we are committed to paying our full-time staffers a living wage, which for Durham right now is $16.25 an hour, plus healthcare and other benefits.
You could also look at it this way: we aim to publish three original stories each day; there are 260 working days in a year. That adds up to 783 stories at a cost of $1,000 apiece, which is equal to $783,300.
We also have a freelance budget of around $800 per week and that is how we pay many of our arts and culture writers, investigative news writers, and interns who aren’t working for us for class credit. So let’s say that, plus other general operating expenses, racks up an additional $300,000 to $400,000, and we have an annual operating budget of some $1.2 million (we don’t make all of that money from sales).
This is all to say: paying writers, photographers, designers, and others who work for the INDY is where your Press Club donations go. We’d love to have a bigger freelance budget someday. We’d love to pay all of our staffers more. We’re figuring out ways to keep going in a world where ad sales won’t do all the heavy lifting any longer—and that’s why your donations are so important to us, and why you can feel good about making them.
Support independent local journalism. Join the INDY Press Club to help us keep fearless watchdog reporting and essential arts and culture coverage viable in the Triangle.
Follow Editor-in-Chief Jane Porter on Twitter or send an email to [email protected].
