After a long spell of puzzling over how to pull it off—the sizable sums of money required, and whether an already-generous Portland would dig even deeper to provide them—Street Roots is taking the plunge on a much-rumored major change.
The nonprofit paper, in its current edition, has launched a fundraising push meant to take it weekly by the end of next year. Right now, the street paper—sold by a team of vendors who rely on that income to keep housed and feed their families—publishes just 26 times a year, or every two weeks.
The effort was given a soft launch earlier this month during the first annual Street Roots Family Breakfast. The event, at the Governor Hotel, was well-attended by city and county bigwigs and candidates (Nick Fish, Marissa Madrigal, Jules Bailey, Deborah Kafoury, Jim Francesconi) and nonprofit luminaries.
Doubling the production cycle would require more staff for an editorial team that relies heavily on freelancers (many of whom, including Alex Zielinski, Nathan Gilles, and Jake Thomas, have also written for the Mercury). The paper, edited by Joanne Zuhl, has been pretty regularly recognized for the quality of its social justice reporting.
But the real goal, executive director Israel Bayer writes, is putting more money in the hands of its hundreds of vendors, by giving them twice the chances to put new product into the hands of readers.
Street Roots vendors currently sell about 70 percent of the newspapers in the first week of publication. With a drastic drop in sales, the second week can be lonely and not very profitable. With a weekly publication, we could vastly increase the support vendors have to improve their quality of life.
With your support we can get there. Street Roots needs to raise $200,000 over the next year to provide the staffing and other supports necessary for a weekly publication with the journalistic excellence our readers and vendors expect.
“Going weekly would mean I would be entirely self-sufficient. It would be awesome,” said George, a Street Roots vendor.