Welp, this is it — the day the rubber meets the road. At noon today, the paywall goes up, and most new articles going forward will require a paid subscription — $7.50 a month, or as we like to say around here, a quarter a day.
Five months of pure insanity (which I would not trade for the world — even the county commission meetings) has led up to this day: the day we find out whether a community our size will actually pay for local news.
For the record, my friend Mark Shead — who owns another local news site and has been putting up with me for 31 years — doesn’t think you will. So, for just a quarter a day, you now have the opportunity to prove Mark Shead wrong.
Folks, I don’t know if I can come up with a better sales pitch than that.
Columns like this one will always be free. Honestly, I’d feel guilty charging you to read my ramblings when I normally pay someone else to listen to them. (I cannot overstate the value of a good therapist.)
Speaking of my therapist, she’s a big part of why the Monitor exists at all. I was incredibly hesitant to go all-in on this, because the last time I left a safe, secure job, it set off a series of events I’m currently chronicling in "How I Nearly Bankrupted My Family at Age 39" (Part 3 publishes Saturday, by the way).
Sensing my apprehension, she told me a story.
Years ago, she was working for an area mental health provider and desperately needed a change of scenery. The organization gave its frontline therapists little support and even less pay, while seemingly adding more and more administrative positions at considerably higher salaries.
So she made a choice: She was going to start her own practice. She’d give it a year, and if it didn’t work out, there were plenty of other mental health providers she could go back to work for.
That seemed ... really logical to me.
The IT labor pool in Bourbon County has only shrunk as I’ve gotten older, and while osteoarthritis makes crawling under desks a lot less fun than it used to be, if push comes to shove, I could go back.
Please don’t make me go back.
All jokes aside, that really was the bargain I made with myself when I gave my boss 60 days notice (which I then stretched into 100) back in January: Give it a shot and see if Bourbon County wants — and is willing to support — the kind of local news coverage I believe it deserves.
For the past five months, I’ve been able to answer the first half of that question. People are reading. People are talking. Most of the talk is even positive!
Today, we start answering the second half.
Because ultimately, this only works if enough people believe that kind of coverage is worth a quarter a day.
That quarter pays for the hours spent sitting through meetings where nothing happens until, suddenly, EVERYTHING happens. It pays for software, court documents, transcription, mileage and equipment. Most importantly, it pays for people, because I cannot do this on my own.
The goal has never been for the Monitor to be one guy with a laptop trying to cover an entire county. The goal is to build something sustainable enough to pay other people to report, take photos, cover meetings and tell the stories I simply cannot get to myself.
And have I mentioned I have three teenage girls to feed?
But seriously, I believe we can build something here that outlasts any one person. Something that can keep showing up. Keep asking questions. Keep digging through records. Keep sitting through those meetings so you don’t have to.
For $7.50 a month — a quarter a day — you can help make that possible.
And, perhaps just as importantly, you can help me prove Mark Shead wrong.
All you have to do is click here.
