Some of you may have noticed that things have been quiet here at Casa Del Tribune lately. Too quiet.

About June this year we hit the wall that so many indie publications hit, the how-do-we-pay-for-this wall. And we hit it with an almighty crash. We were too small to attract big advertisers and too big to get the small ones. Printing costs were not huge, but it was too high for us to finance ourselves and there was no way to get anyone else to pay for publication of a free magazine.

So, what to do?

We could stop…ok, no we couldn’t do that. We’re obsessed and addicted and not willing to give up yet.

We could scale the Tribune down to just a hobby website with no print product and publish writers who had the time and interest to write for free, whenever they had the time and interest to write for free, whenever we had the time to edit and publish it. But there are already a lot of websites doing that, and they’re doing it with far more time and resources than we have (hello The Drum, yes, we’re looking at you)… so, at best, we’d be the poor relation, which is not what we’re aiming for.

Good writers, especially the ones who are trying to scrape together a living out of writing, need to get paid. They need to have the time to research and think, they need to know that what they do is valued and occasionally they need to eat and pay rent. That’s getting harder and harder to do. At the same time it’s getting harder and harder to find strong, informed and intelligent analysis or satire of politics, media and current affairs.

There’s probably a connection.

So, we’ve decided to take the Tribune to the next level.

Starting October this year and vastly expanded King’s Tribune will be selling in newsagents around Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra. We’ll also be selling subscriptions and individual direct from our website.

We’ll keep the price as low as we possibly can - this is not a money-making exercise, but we can’t provide the quality of content we want to give you for free.

With very few exceptions, most people we’ve talked to about this have told us it’s going to fail. They tell us that no-one is spending money on print media any more; that people will resent being asked to pay for what was once a free publication; that the internet the only place people go to read about current affairs and they only do that when they don’t have to pay for it.

The nay-sayers may be right, this could end up leaving us with nothing but a huge debt and a failed dream. That would suck. A lot.

Clearly though, I don’t believe them. I don’t think the age of print media is dead, I think the age of crap print media is dead. I think that people understand why they need to pay for quality journalism and are willing to do so, they just have trouble getting hold of it. I think that if we offer something valuable people will value it enough to pay a small amount to keep it going. I think we can offer that.

Come October we’ll find out who’s right.

We’ll be posting updates on how it’s all going over the next few weeks, if you haven’t already signed up for the email alerts you can do so on the left menu (usual no spam, no selling your data caveats apply).

As soon as we are able to, we’ll be pre-selling the first issue from the website. Try it out, have a good look at what we are doing, tell us what you think. Then, if you like it, tell all your friends.

If you hate it then you should probably just keep schtum.

Thanks for sticking with us this far, it's your loyalty and support that keeps us believing we can do more.

Jane & Justin Shaw
Editors
The King’s Tribune

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