Amid the uncertainty of closures and cancellations on March 19, I fear I cast doubt on the future of The Sopris Sun by suggesting that we might temporarily suspend our print edition.
It was, and still is, on the table. If we had any reason to believe our papers or boxes were a serious vector of disease — for you or our delivery drivers — we wouldn’t hesitate. Similarly, if the stay at home order was preventing folks from picking them up, we’d have to look at alternatives (although survey results showed only middling support for such measures).
But for now, although we had to nix almost all of our indoor stops, we’re still delivering to our boxes even where other papers have cut back — look for the gold markers at soprissun.com/about-us/locations to find one near you. We’ve stopped short of pulling the doors off, but some places we have installed zip ties to make them easier to open hands free.
And folks seem to be picking them up and, what’s more, advertising. That’s a pretty strong message that the paper is valued, and since we’re mostly funded by print ads, we’re not arguing. We will be launching a fundraising campaign in coming weeks, and while even the corporate papers are asking for money these days, we hope our open-book, nonprofit approach will continue to earn us your support.
We can’t thank you all enough for having our backs so far. With the Post Independent cutting its weekend editions and the Weekly Journal suspending publication, it’s not something we take for granted. We were particularly touched at Madeleine Osberger’s shoutout in her farewell column, and hope the people of Basalt will let us know if there’s any way we can fill that void and cover the community that isn’t already being handled by the Aspen papers.
Indeed, we are more than usually reliant on the community to let us know what’s happening so we can share it with our readers. Please don’t hesitate to email news@soprissun.com with tips or questions, and feel free to follow up if it seems like we haven’t followed through.
These are uncertain times, and I can’t say how things will look for us in a few weeks or months, but for now, we’re proud to carry on.