Dig deep my friends and family this magazine is an important voice for all Natives in California

From Margaret Durbin, Editor News From Native California

Dear friends, Happy New Year, I hope you are all doing well! Thank you all for your recent contributions to News from Native California. Some of them have already been scheduled to appear in the spring issue; others are still waiting in line.

I’m writing today to let you know what is happening with News and ask for a favor. This Monday, Malcolm told me I would need to accept a 50% cut in pay and decrease the size of the magazine to 32 pages in order to keep it in print. Like most small publications, we have always struggled a bit to stay afloat, but I guess things were worse than we had thought and now, with the tanking economy, there doesn’t seem to be any other way out. Of course I fought for myself and the magazine; long story short, I accepted a significant pay cut and took on about 50% more work (all the proofreading and fundraising, which previously had been done by other staffers) to keep the magazine alive, and that is only on a trial basis. If, after three months, I cannot show a balanced budget and increased donations, we are back to the drawing board, and I’m afraid neither the magazine (nor my job) will survive another round of cuts.

Because of the decreased size of the magazine, contributors will have to wait longer to see their articles in print. (And because I will be doing the proofreading, there may be more typos!) Even worse, we no longer have the funds to pay for articles or photographs. If you have known me personally for any length of time you know that, despite all my faults, I am a person of my word, and I always try to honor the hard work of contributors by compensating them as generously as possible, especially our photographers, who incur material as well as time costs. But I am stuck between a rock and a hard place. If you can afford to donate whatever pay I promised you back to News, we would be very grateful. Some of you already do this on a regular basis, and for this all of us at Heyday applaud you. For the others, any amount you feel you can afford to donate back to us would be a huge help.

And of course, if any of you is in a position to donate money (or future articles or photographs, I expect this budget problem to last all year) to the magazine, please let me know. Renewing subscriptions and giving gift subscriptions to your friends is also great, but what we need most at this moment is donations so that I can show Malcolm the community’s level of support and interest in the magazine. If you are already a subscriber or a friend of News, you will be getting a letter from me sometime in the next month saying more or less the same thing, please excuse the redundancy.

Feel free to email me with individual questions, concerns, complaints… Or call me at home (510) 597-1906 or on my cell (510) 421-0435. I’m already over my minutes for the month so I might not be able to talk long.

Very sincerely, Margaret Dubin (managing editor of News from Native California)

Dig deep my friends and family this magazine is an important voice for all Natives in California: http://www.heydaybooks.com/news/

Posted on March 29th, 2009 by hunwut
Filed under: Community, News