A couple of months back a fundraiser was held on a nightly Welsh News Network broadcast in support of this publication. While the daily newspaper has always been intended to be a free publication, I need to eat, I need to pay bills and I need to keep the lights on to be able to bring you the paper each day.
From time to time, we will be participating in fundraising efforts, and we’ve established our tip jar (formerly known as the tongue in cheek “dear god, please donate so I can eat” spam on every news article), and will be promoting that tip jar on our on-going coverage of the Karen Read Murder Trial hosted on the Welsh News Network YouTube channel.
As reporter Grant Smith Ellis has noted, independent journalism doesn’t pay much. Often the costs involved outweigh any profits received from the story. On Tuesday, for example, documents from Jose “Chille” DeCastro’s lawsuit against Michael “Blue Bacon” Pierattini and others cost us $16.00 to feature in an article that has no advertising other than the tip jar. Thankfully, a reader donated a little more than that independently which brought us back in the black for the day.
Records searches for documents and the purchasing of documents in support of a story can be expensive. Just a simple search of PACER for documents for the past day can run between $0.10 and $0.60 just to find out that there was nothing new in the case.
I know $.60 doesn’t sound like much but multiply it by the five to ten cases we follow, with seven days a week of searches (yes, documents do turn up on Sundays when they theoretically shouldn’t), and things start to pile up quickly.
Part of the fundraising from the Welsh News Network fundraiser has been withheld to help with our quarterly PACER costs. That said, donations from WNN in the past have also offset PACER costs and the cost of documents you see on many of our stories from the Las Vegas and California court systems, which charge 2 to 5 times that of Pacer.
While we’ve had a ton of readers pitching in when there’s been breaking news and we can’t afford to purchase the documents on our own, WNN has always stepped in when asked and donated without question to support our efforts.
I will be releasing the records that I have of the gift donations we received from the last fundraiser that was held on WNN in the near future. Frankly, it’s 4:19AM as I write this and at some point I’m going to screw it up if I attempt to grab all the receipts now and rush through them for publication.
The point being, a fundraiser was held for the paper by WNN and we received what was raised by the fundraiser. We’ll be releasing the receipts for what we received here in the next couple of days.
I also must apologize to those winners who I promised digital avatars to and have not delivered on them. The avatars were a last-minute addition, and most people didn’t understand what we were offering. Simply put, the artwork you see on nearly every article is produced in a program used to design actual video game characters and then animated through a related program.
There are costs involved in purchasing the assets for that program to produce the artwork (dressing digital avatars costs almost as much as actually purchasing clothing), and what we were offering was the ability either to be immortalized as a digital character or to pick the next auditing or auditing personalities we make as digital avatars for use in the artwork for this publication.
Digital avatar creation is a painstaking process. It takes hours and even days to produce avatars that look remotely like our subjects. I’ve produced one of the six avatars so far (Karen Read) and will be working on the others as life and time presents itself.
It was a mistake to offer, I knew the time constraints involved, and I will do my best to fulfill my promises. The buck stops with me and I will do my best to make things right.
With that, we return you to our regularly scheduled news…
Jim
Tip Jar
ReallyCoolNews is a free daily publication devoted to the First Amendment Auditing community. If you’d like to support the publication/help keep the author fed/help support his animals, we offer the following ways to contribute:
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