The past two months we’ve thanked volunteers and businesses who have pitched in to help the Chronicle provide local news for our community. Another group that deserves special thanks is our subscribers.
This has been another good year for website subscriptions. Active subscribers have increased 18% and net revenue is up almost 11% over 2023. Readers now account for more than 20% of the Chronicle’s total revenue.
That’s important, because those subscription dollars help us pay reporters. Without reporters, we have no news to share with the community.
We are grateful for the group of journalists your support is underwriting. They have a range of experience, from old pros to young people still in or just out of college. They bring to the job a commitment to provide fair, accurate, reliable information the community needs.
Our current reporters include Karen Torme Olson, Nick Ulanowski, Summer Kiswani, Chris Weber, David Funk, Faith Lee (between semesters) and Kate Atkins-Trimnell.
Former reporters include Bill Jones, Carole Sharwarko, Nuha Abdessalam, Stephanie Markham, Danielle Banks, Brittney Ermon, Quinton Arthur, Noah Johnson, Carrie Steinweg, Sharon Filkins, Joseph Dorsey, Angela Denk, Annelise Latham, Bob Reilly, Jalyn Edwards, Christian Villanueva, Haleigh Porter and R.L. Anderson.
We received an email in May from former reporter Brittney Ermon who has gone on to pursue a career in journalism.
“Time is flying! I’m a TV News reporter at KSTP-TV in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I’ve been here going on 3 years and I love it! … I am forever thankful for my time with the Chronicle. Interning with you taught me so much early on and I’m able to use those skills now as a TV reporter.”
These days reporters also take photos and video, but we have at times had the pleasure of working with photojournalists, including Andrew Burke-Stevenson and the late Mary Compton.
These professional journalists have been great to work with and have brought their own skills of observation, research and writing to the task of telling the story of our community. Thank you!
I also want to thank a related group of professionals we’ve worked with: videographers.
Anne Colton was a Homewood trustee when I first met her. She was one of the first people I checked with when I was thinking about starting a newspaper, and she encouraged me to pursue the idea. She has used her skills as a documentary filmmaker to create several promotional videos for the Chronicle, one of which helped us campaign for contributions to our first print edition.
And she put together a band to play at a fundraising party in the fall of 2015, which helped put us over the top of our fundraising goal for that first edition.
We’re also very thankful to Marcellus Marsh, who we’ve worked with on our Meet the Candidates series of video interviews prior to local elections. His team at Bionic Content also produced the State of Golf documentary in 2021, which is worth revisiting if you’re ever interested in learning more about the role of the sport in the history of the H-F area. (See bit.ly/stateofgolf to watch.)
Antiracism library
Among the nuggets of received wisdom most of us grow up with is “Never discuss religion or politics in polite company.” The advice is intended to help people avoid awkward moments or the emergence of conflict in situations that would be marred by unpleasantness.
Not mentioned in the wisdom nugget but often observed as off the table anyway is a third topic: race. Discussing race is awkward, especially for lots of white people. The nation’s history of hate and violence seems to loom like a stormcloud over every utterance.
The anxiety over talking about race, though, also serves as an impediment to healing the ancient rift. Fortunately, there are some thoughtful guides out there for helping us learn to talk about race.
“Speaking of Race: How to Have Antiracist Conversations That Bring Us Together” is by Patricia Roberts-Miller. I took a rhetoric class from her as a graduate student at the University of Missouri in the 1990s and have followed her blog for years. Her credentials to talk about race are informed by a career spent studying demogoguery.
She unpacks why conversations about racism can so often escalate dramatically. The main factors include the tendency to see racism as a binary rather than a complex array of information, misinformation and inherited attitudes. The one thing most people agree on is that racism is bad, but if they don’t also agree on a working definition of racism, conflict ensues.
“Thinking about racism as all or nothing (you’re Hitler or ‘you don’t have a racist bone in your body’) contributes to racism because it enables us to refuse to think about whether we’ve done something racist on the grounds that we aren’t as bad as Hitler.”
The second part of the book moves from diagnosing the problem to suggesting strategies for productive conversations, with chapter titles that offer a good overview: “Assume Nothing,” “Listen,” “Understand the Role of Privilege,” “Racism Isn’t About White People’s Feelings” and “Key Things to Remember in the Heat of the Moment.”
Roberts-Miller is a rhetoric scholar who excels at lucid explaining rather than lecturing. She acknowledges her own racist moments, making her advice more accessible because it’s informed by experience as well as study.
