Support locally controlled, locally produced journalism that is invested in your community.
I think my favorite question I have gotten since starting The Bugle is: “So, are you independently wealthy or what?”
Funny story actually, I am not.
There are no ads and subscribing to the Morning Bugle Newsletter is free, so how am I supporting this? I’ve taken to using the term self-funding. Basically, I pay for the costs of the website and newsletter out of pocket and am not compensated for my time spent producing The Bugle. (As you may have guessed, I didn’t go to business school.)
That has been how The Bugle has operated for 20ish months now. I pay a few hundred dollars a month, the website keeps chugging and more than 2,000 people receive a free newsletter of locally reported news a couple times a week.
I will say, I’m proud of the 2,000 subscribers number. Well, 2,153 as of Friday morning. I have done very little to advertise or promote this newsletter, rather I’ve just produced news people are looking for and you have shared it.
Perhaps even more importantly, more than 70% of you are opening the Morning Bugle Newsletter every time I send it. I’m not an expert, but I hear that is really good open rate. That tells me The Bugle is a valuable source of news for the Yampa Valley. It tells me I can’t stop.
Something else I have learned in this 20ish months is that I can’t do this alone forever. I’ve been working a full-time job in addition to The Bugle to support myself. I’m tired and it’s getting harder to afford to keep things going.
The ultimate goal with The Bugle is to transition into a nonprofit so that one day it would be able to continue on, even if I wasn’t involved any more. I want it to be a lasting resource for the community that is owned and controlled locally, and not by some billionaire from West Virginia. I need your help to get there.
Yesterday, I launched a membership option for The Bugle, allowing readers like you to contribute monthly to support my work. Using a platform called Patreon, you can now sign up to support the work I am doing with The Yampa Valley Bugle starting at $10 a month. I strive to put out at least 10 newsletters a month, so you can think of it as $1 a newsletter.
There are a few different levels you can choose from and the cool thing about Patreon is it allows you to choose to support at a higher level if you wish, so feel free to adjust it to whatever you think is appropriate. (Note: currently you can't adjust to less than $10, but let me know if I should add a lower tier.)
I want to be really clear about two things:
One, The Yampa Valley Bugle is not currently a nonprofit organization. I know I have talked about it and I’ve gotten close to going in a few different directions to achieve that status, but as of now I am not a nonprofit in any way.
Two, this doesn’t change anything with the newsletter — it will still be free to anyone and everyone that subscribes. It won’t change access on the website either, that too will remain free. I am not a fan of paywalls and want my reporting to be accessible to anyone that wants to read it.
Honestly, what you are getting with membership to The Bugle at this stage is more of a feeling than anything tangible. I see opportunity for member benefits in the future, but for now you will know that you are supporting locally controlled, locally produced journalism that is invested in your community. You will allow me to keep sending you and your neighbors this newsletter, and hopefully, you will help me increase the frequency it lands in your inbox.
Any support I earn through membership would be used to pay for the technical costs of operating YampaValleyBugle.com and sending this newsletter. It will be also be used to compensate me for my work and ensure The Bugle continues.
If there is enough support, members will allow me to further grow The Bugle. For example, there are several local freelance journalists I would love to get writing for me, but I need to be able to compensate them for their work. I’ve got a ton of ideas for the future, and a lot of people have shared what they hope The Bugle can become for this community as well.
I think it could be pretty special, but I need your help to get there.