Yesterday was the final day of our summer subscription drive and I’m happy to report that, while we didn’t reach the goal we stated at the outset, we’ve come away with enough subscribers to continue. So, I wanted to take a moment and thank you for subscribing to No Depression. (If you haven’t yet, you can subscribe now.) Those who subscribed during the drive will be receiving their first journal shortly. Starting today, new subscriptions will begin with the Fall/Foremothers issue.
I was hired by the former publisher Kyla Fairchild in 2008, shortly after the original magazine went out of print, to be the news editor of what was then “the new nodepression.com” (Grant Alden was still the editor at that time). It’s been a wild ride since then: five years of barely staying afloat on the Ning platform, changing hands, navigating a couple of major web redesigns, listening to our gut and our longest-standing readers and returning to print. We’ve had some coworkers come and go and our organization on the backend has certainly been through some growing pains. But now our web traffic is upwards of 250k unique readers per month and the magazine is back in print and growing as a quarterly journal.
Still, the intersection of music industry and media is not the most stable place to be these days. After years of evolutions and growth, we found ourselves earlier this year in a serious reality check. Companies of any kind have to make a profit to survive, and ND has struggled to do that for almost a decade. It was not an easy decision to put it all on the line and hope we’d come out the other side of this subscription drive with something to show for it. But the support has been heartening, and the numbers are starting to make sense.
To boot, we’re in production on the Fall issue, which will go to the printer next month, to be shipped out to all our new subscribers by the end of the summer.
Here on the web, we’re working on some necessary changes. After all, this website you’re looking at was designed before we’d moved back into print.
The primary thrust of these changes is to make sure our website focuses on news, reviews, columns, and supporting the journal. We’ve recently hired a news and social media editor, Brittney McKenna, who will be focused on music news and new music. Our longtime assistant editor Stacy Chandler will be managing reviews and columns. The columnists will be the same folks you know and love. While we’ll continue to employ a very small group of staff reviewers (two at the moment), we’ll be renewing our commitment to community album and live reviews, bringing a great deal more of those forward with Stacy’s edits.
After we publish a handful of backlogged features this month, that we hired out before the drive, we’ll discontinue feature stories on the web. At that point, anyone wishing to write a longer article for No Depression is encouraged to pitch it to me for the print journal, where we pay by the word. (Email kim at nodepression dot com with your pitch.)
As we get into the facelift, some other small changes might creep up — website changes tend to happen like matryoshka dolls, though we’re determined to keep changes to a minimum. I’ll keep you posted and appreciate your patience in the meantime.
And, in the meantime, thank you again. We have committed to keeping ND alive because of our passion for great music and great stories, and being able to focus on both every day is a gift. We literally could not continue without your support, so thank you for subscribing and for showing up regularly to read this site.
