Editor's Note: Tim Covi
Thursday, April 1, 2010 at 12:26PM Published April 2010 Vol. 14 Issue 4
by Tim Covi
While print journalism is floundering and well-established publications across the country tighten their belts, cutting content, page-count and staff, it’s interesting and ironic to see the success of “street” papers.
The Denver VOICE’s distribution has been bouncing off 17,000 papers a month for nearly a year, vastly higher than the 1,500 papers we started vending in August 2007. In that time, the Rocky Mountain News closed, turning Denver from a two-daily to a one-daily city for the first time in over a century.
Another large distribution street paper, Seattle’s Real Change, has had even greater success. Now distributing upwards of 72,000 papers a month, Real Change went from roughly 250 vendors a month to 350 when the economy turned south. During the same period, one of the oldest businesses in the city, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, stopped printing and converted to an online only news source.
So what is it that makes street papers viable at a time when these bastions of print news are failing? In part, obviously, it’s a question of scale. We’re still relatively small, low budget operations without the bloated newsrooms and printing presses to worry about. But that could be said about plenty of weeklies as well—a number of which are building their online presence as their print service lags.
More important than size, street papers are publications that have relevance not only in terms of ideas and content, but also on a social level—for the vendors who need immediate employment to help alleviate or escape poverty or street life. We fill a niche for people who want critical ideas, but also want to help others.
This gives us a huge responsibility. Beyond surviving for ourselves and our readers, we need to find a way to stay alive for our vendors. In 2009, 989 people worked for the VOICE, distributing over 177,500 papers. On average, our vendors earned $2.00 per issue. Collectively, this means that Denver VOICE readers put $355,128 into our vendors’ hands last year.
Some vendors earned enough to get into housing. Currently, 55 percent of our vendors live in hotels, apartments and houses, and 82 percent of these vendors reported paying for their housing with money earned from vending the paper.
To keep these vendors in business and help Denver’s growing homeless population by building our vendor program, we need to raise money every year. This year we’re implementing our first-ever silent auction. We hope, as avid readers, you can either attend or will consider contributing something for bid. We will hold a dinner and comedy show in conjunction with the auction at Baur’s Ristorante on Thursday, May 13 from 6-9 P.M. Tickets for the dinner and show are $100.
Please consider coming out and supporting the VOICE and our many vendors!
April 2010, Tim Covi, editor's note in Editor's Note
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