If you submitted an Op-Ed and we didn’t publish it (yet), there’s a good reason. Our stable of contributors (Groksters) has been cranking out a lot of material. Last week, I addressed this (to some degree) by dropping a lot more content than usual, but I’m reluctant to do it again.
When we exceed a certain threshold for updates, people stop clicking and reading. Put another way, it doesn’t increase traffic, and fewer people will likely read your content. Upcoming site design changes might mitigate that, and on that point, the design team tried uploading a test version of the new site to the new server. There were some issues, and they are working them out.
Anyway, new site – soon. I hope. And the home page layout is different from anything we’ve ever done before. The goal is a wider appeal to broader audiences across New England and the Nation. We’re Still GraniteGrok, but we’ve sorted things so people can get to what they want to ‘Grok! —New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine, Regional staff, National Stuff, and Global Stuff. They each have their own section on the home page and their own “page behind that,” and while some topics will cross categories – and the stuff up top will be the most recent, it’s … different.
I hope you like it. We also expect it to be quite a bit faster than the old one. I have not seen what the mobile version looks like, but once this is up and stable, debugged, tweaked, and seamless, we’ll move on to the mobile app, and that shouldn’t matter so much.
Fundraising.
The economy sucks, and we appreciate you giving what you can when you can, but I am obligated to bring it up a lot because this only works if we raise enough funds. Last year, we did well, but we did not raise enough, and I had to take part-time work to make up the difference. It is work I can mostly do from home. But I do it for several hours every day, so I am not free to do any of the reporting from Concord or event hopping I’d hoped to do. The session is over, so there’s that, but the campaign season has jump-started at the State level, and we will miss out on most of that, events, and so on.
I’m fine if you don’t care about us reporting from campaign events, but there are other stories we won’t be able to chase or follow up on. I get a lot of stuff I can’t commit to because of the time required to do it properly. I don’t have it.
We’ll get there at some point, just not this year and not yet.
We are currently raising funds for fiscal 2025, and we have a long way to go. It is mid-June, and we’ve got about 13% of what we need. At a minimum, we need to get to 60%, which is what happened last year. The recently updated ads to fundraise have resulted in some response, but since neither Skip nor I is any good at this part, it is a problem. And everyone is asking for money: campaigns, non-Protifts, Activists, and us.
If you are good at this fundraising thing, we could use your help.
Other Business
There is no word yet on whether we will attempt another Groktoberfest this year. Planning will have to start soon, and as noted above, we need to find ways to cover expenses. It’s an election year, so we’ll see what the venue situation looks like and what the costs are. We did make some money on last year’s event, so it is worth looking at.
And, as always, Thanks for reading!
