We're becoming a non-profit, and we need your help.
Sara Swanson (left) and Marsha Chartrand (right). From Unforgettable Photos March 2020 Storefront photo series.
The Manchester Mirror is a business.
From the beginning of print news coverage in Manchester, in 1867 when George Spafford and Mat Blosser established The Manchester Enterprise, until Washtenaw Now (the inheritor of the Manchester Enterprise) ceased publication in 2015, Manchester newspapers were funded through advertising. Almost all of the money that used to go into advertising in local newspapers now goes into Google and/or Facebook ads, or advertising has been abandoned all together by businesses in favor of building a strong social media presence. Because newspapers have always been tied so closely to advertising, when advertising money dried up, many newspapers closed down.
The free market determined that Manchester, and communities across the country, no longer could support local newspapers. Newspapers were out-competed, not because there was suddenly something providing better local news coverage, but because advertisers want ads in front of eyes and there is now something better than local news coverage at doing that. The fact that local news coverage was incidentally tied to advertising was bad news for newspapers.
In we stepped in 2013, (perhaps naïvely!) determined to bring back local news coverage. We set up the Manchester Mirror as a business because it was the only way we knew how to do it at the time. We worked out of our homes, on our own computers, banking on our non-existent overhead to give us enough financial breathing room to run an advertising-supported newspaper. But the truth is — as we discovered over and over — Manchester truly does not have a large enough advertising pool to run a traditional, advertising-supported newspaper.
So for the last nine years we’ve used the minimal money that has come in through advertising, and more recently through donations, to pay the bills (printing costs, internet costs, etc) and we’ve run, for the most part, on volunteer labor. Because while there isn't enough advertising money to do anything but pay the basic costs of the operation, there remains a robust demand for local news.
The Manchester Mirror is, in fact, a community service.
Although we started as a group of five and at our largest we had seven people working on the Mirror, we are down to three, with Marsha Chartrand and Sara Swanson doing almost all of the day-to-day work. While we love what we do and are committed to keeping the Mirror running, we have no safety net or redundancies. If one of us got sick or or had a family emergency that required more than a week or two off, the Mirror would cease to exist.
Looking ahead last summer, we realized that in order to ensure the Mirror continues well into the future, we need to make some major changes behind the scenes and bring in more people. On the shoulders of two people is a precarious way to conduct a business.
Our first step was to become a 501c3 non-profit. Although we started this process last summer, everything is moving slowly at the State level right now, and the lawyer with whom we are working estimates another three months until this is finalized. Becoming a 501c3 non-profit will mean the donations we receive will be tax-deductible for the donors; it will mean we won’t have to pay taxes on the money we bring in; and it will clarify our mission as first and foremost a community service.
Our second step is to bring in more volunteers. We’re in the process of defining what it takes to run the Mirror into discrete jobs. Writing articles is absolutely a job we’d love to have people volunteer for, but there are administrative jobs as well — like managing the classified ads, overseeing public notices, or billing. Some jobs, like monitoring email, is something that needs to be done very regularly, while other jobs are weekly — like picking up the printed paper from the printer in Brooklyn and delivering it to distribution points around Manchester, while a few, like overseeing the Voter’s guide or Christmas in the Village guide, are once a year.
We are asking all of our readers to consider volunteering in some way. We have jobs that meet everyone’s levels of availability and interest. Currently we are asking anyone who would be interested in volunteering in some capacity, whether or not you have an idea of what that would be, to email us at themanchestermirror@gmail.com with “volunteer” in the subject line. Emailing us is not a commitment, this is just to collect contact info. We also plan to hold an organizational meeting, either in person or virtually, in early March.
The Manchester Mirror is whatever we make of it going forward.
We have no plans to stop the Mirror anytime soon! We do want to make sure that when something changes down the line, we have a robust enough organization in place, that the newspaper can weather that storm.
This is not just about longevity. This is also an opportunity to make the paper what you want it to be. Do you wish we had a church section that had updated weekly service information and you’d be happy to be in charge of it? Do you go to every High School baseball game or wrestling meet and wish the Mirror covered them? Do you know what is happening in your township but you don't see it in the Mirror? Do you wish the subscriptions would be mailed faster with fewer mistakes and you are good at organization? This is YOUR opportunity to help shape the Mirror into what you want to see it become!
We look forward to hearing from you.
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