$500 for water? Windex? Batteries? That’s right, running a newsroom costs money. We shell out cash for video cameras, freelance reporters, DSLR cameras, microphones, quadruple espresso shots, and more, because getting the news that matters to you, matters to us.
Want to give back? Make a tax-deductible donation Mission Local today. Here’s just a few places your dollars will go:
- Accommodations: Our rent is $600 a month. Which means that we pay $7200 for our small (but very well-decorated) space on Mission Street every year. If just 300 of our loyal readers donated $24, we’d have rent covered.
- The talent: Every so often, our UC Berkeley Graduate Student reporters decide to do real-people things, like sleep and go on vacation over holiday breaks. For this, we’ve allotted an annual budget of $40,000, to pay interns to cover the news while our students’ alarm clocks are on snooze.
- Internet: $2400. That’s how much we pay every year to deliver the news to you.
- Hydration: Journalists are famously hungry, but we also get thirsty from time to time. Each month, we spend $40 on water, which adds up to $500 a year. You know the drill. Don’t want to shell out $10? That’s fine, too. Just 100 donations of $5 would handle annual H20 for our thirsty staff.
- Cleaning/Supplies: $2000: Yup, this is how much we have to pay every year to maintain a semblance of decorum in our tiny space.
- Print edition: $8000. Each year, we publish four print editions that cost $2000 each; each one provides articles in English and Spanish for readers who don’t have access to internet.
- Freelancers: $6000. We rely on our talented freelancers to comb the Mission for good stories. We spend about $6000 on these reporters every year, and just a couple dollars from you will help ensure that this continues.
This all adds up to about $66,000 a year. If each of you, loyal readers, donated $10, we would be able to cover all of our annual fees, with money to spare. And extra cash means more reporting.
So consider your donation an investment: in Mission Local, quality community reporting, and most importantly? The Mission, the neighborhood we all love to call home.
From what I’ve read on your “About” page, you have no mission statement. Will you be a muckraking site, a business-booster site, a lifestyle site or what? Because if you try to be all things to all people, you’ll be none of them.
Russo, your assumption there appears to be that a local news website should not be neutral, objective and balanced in the way that the best newspapers have always been.
But rather that is should be biased, partisan and slanted to one particular agenda over another. And that it should cover some local issues and not other local issues.
Why? there are plenty of advocacy and activist websites out there and if you want a skewed agenda with your news, then such a thing is not hard to find.
But isn’t there room for an old-fashioned comprehensive, neutral voice around these parts? If that is their mission statement then they have my support. Reporting the district rather than trying to change it is a perfectly valid aim. And we’re not all angry and bitter, craving revolution.