Dear Reader,
Each of us is currently being challenged to act heroically. Xpress’ challenge is to tell the stories of those actions and show how, together, they are creating and maintaining our community.
We’re working hard to operate efficiently and provide you with the most up-to-date and useful information. But we are facing unprecedented challenges in our newsroom.
A lot of what has abruptly closed or stopped in the last week — events, businesses, fitness centers, restaurants — are our advertisers. In the face of these cessations, many organizations have canceled their ads, which means that about half the revenue that supports Xpress‘ community-focused reporting has vanished in a matter of days.
To give you a sense of how serious this is: The Stranger, Seattle’s storied, Pulitzer Prize-winning alt-weekly, just laid off three-fourths of its staff and shut down its print publication — temporarily, it hopes — in response to the coronavirus-related downturn.
Xpress, too, must reduce costs to survive as a public service over the next few weeks or months, however long this lasts. However, we do not plan to cease publishing the weekly newspaper. We’ve provided local community news for 25 years. Now isn’t the time to stop.
So we are asking you for your help: If you’re able to chip in and help us through this challenging time, your membership contribution would be very timely and much appreciated. Your contribution — whether $5 or $10 or $25 a month; $10 or $50 or $100 as a one-time give — will help keep Xpress’ journalism strong at a time when having free, accessible and thorough coverage is especially vital to the health and wellbeing of our community.
If you’ve been putting off making a contribution, there’s no time like now. Here’s that link again. It only takes a moment.
If you’ve already joined or made a one-time contribution, consider making another one-time contribution or upping your monthly donation to the next tier. Share this email with your friends and family. Support the businesses who are advertising in Xpress and let them know you saw their advertisement in the paper.
Over the next week, our goal is to add 100 new members to our program. We hope that you can pitch in and help us meet this goal so that we can continue to deliver reliable news and information to everyone in the community.
Thank you for your consideration.
Jeff Fobes
Publisher and founder
Mountain Xpress
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