Every month, a trickle of, normally small, donations find their way to Rye News via PayPal, cheques and bank transfers. Over a year, these smaller amounts build up and provide the essential life blood that keeps Rye News going.
We hope you enjoy the mix of news, opinions, specialist articles and information that comes your way each week, but none of it would happen without your generous support! Local journalism is under significant threat across the country, and we like to think we have come up with a solution that is viable in the long term, and plays an important and inclusive role in understanding and championing local community needs.
This is not a “begging” article, but a big thank you to all of you who have contributed, often over many years, to keep us in business.
Where does the money go? Primarily it is used to support the IT platform that we use to publish the paper every week. This is the engine room of our operations, without which we simply would not exist. Our stories and events are submitted into the system, and a comprehensive editorial process is completed in our database each week before we can release our weekly issue. We also have to manage an enormous picture library, addressing necessary crediting and copyright requirements, as well as storage. We have faced major challenges in this area. Simply, keeping it updated and operational requires continuous maintenance and sadly, like many others, we have been subjected to malicious attacks that requires us to invest in comprehensive security measures.
To this end, we are also very pleased to recognise the Sussex Community Foundation Little Cheyne Court Wind Farm Community Fund, who have just announced an important grant to Rye News. This will be primarily targeted at securing, managing and developing our publishing system and allow our internal resources, along with our new IT partner Westfield Creative, to ensure we have a strong base for the long-term development of our paper. In due course, we hope that you will begin to see some new capabilities to make your access to, and appreciation of, Rye News as good as possible.
In this context, it would be wrong not to mention our dedicated team of volunteers who help our editor, James Stewart, put together an informative and entertaining (we hope!) publication each week.
As ever, we welcome and encourage input as to how to develop your newspaper, and of course would welcome anyone who wishes to join in to help and participate in Rye News. There are many ways of doing so in ways that will match your interests and time availability.
As we approach our 10-year anniversary we would like to thank you once again, first for reading us regularly, and especially to all those who generously provide financial support, not just to keep Rye News going but critically to help us evolve to match future opportunities and challenges.
Image Credits: Sussex Community Foundation .