If you’ve been checking out LEO over the last year, you’ve seen the increase in content, the redesigned website and book, and a general invigorated spirit going into the paper. It is quite nice.
In 2023, our CEO, who only runs small independent papers like LEO, had a tough choice: close LEO or invest. He chose the latter, and we’ve survived another day because of that decision. If we continue to survive, it involves you, the local public.
While we’d love to have the benefit of an endowment (taking all open-minded benefactor offers) or nonprofit status, we don’t have either of those, but what we do have is the chance for each of you to take a small step in keeping your hometown paper going. Visit our “Support Local Journalism” tab. That will take you to a page allowing you to make a monthly donation to your LEO Weekly. Three options: $5, $10, or $25 a month each are available for you to support LEO. We also accept direct one time gifts at our address via check or money order. All donations to LEO are taxable for us but the support goes a long way.
Where does your money go?
Directly to the operations of the paper. That includes staff, who all work well under comparable salaries, supplies, printing, web fees, the future ability to hire new staff and grow the paper you love. Bottom line: the money keeps us alive and has the potential to help LEO thrive.
What your money doesn’t buy is our independence or our voices. Those remain true to the LEO brand and mission. But if you’re reading LEO, most likely you are interested in our perspective, even if it doesn’t necessarily jibe with your own.
The hard fact is, the newsroom of yesteryear is gone. Most large media outlets are paid for by large corporate dollars and can only bring you the story that these corporations allow. We’ve seen this in real time this year after the United Healthcare debacle.
At LEO, we’re still able to tell the real story, offer a variety of perspectives that don’t come paid for by corporations we might criticize, and we do all of that and more with far less than the mainstream outlets, but there comes a breaking point, and we’ve teetered on the edge of it too many times.
We don’t have a large team with copy editors, staff photographers, and a 40 or more writers. Your LEO is (aside from the freelancers making almost no money) three editorial staff (we’d love to add a second news writer in 2025), 2 admin/sales staff, and one or two interns strong. That’s it. That’s who makes LEO happen each week and we’ve only had that many staff since April 1. Before we were three editorial staff, we were two, and then one. LEO has been through it.
The LEO I dream of has at least three more editorial staff members for a total of 6. Not a big ask but one that requires over $100,000 to properly hire and equip. That would give us our second news writer, a photographer on staff and another generalist staff writer to help cover the amazing events in this city… especially the music scene which constantly amazes me, and is an area we just cannot cover enough.
Of course, a straight donation isn’t the only way to support LEO, but it is the most direct. We have plenty of events. Keep your eyes peeled for the next one.
However you choose to support our work, either by visiting our “Support Local Journalism” page or by attending one of the events, we are thankful for you allowing us to continue serving the local community in a way that only LEO can.
Erica Rucker is LEO Weekly’s editor-in-chief. In addition to her work at LEO, she is a haphazard writer, photographer, tarot card reader, and fair-to-middling purveyor of motherhood. Her earliest memories are of telling stories to her family and promising that the next would be shorter than the first. They never were.
This article appears in Apr 9-23, 2024.