Readers,

I won’t sugarcoat the truth in my articles, and I’m not going to spin the facts in our fundraising campaigns. We’re coming up short of our goal of getting 700 more subscribers by July 1.

Since we launched our fundraising drive on April 26, we’ve received 247 new subscribers, meaning we still need about 450 more to pull this off by July 1. (To the more than 200 people who signed up, thank you!) If you’re ready to become a paying supporter of Decaturish, please visit supportyourlocalnews.com today and help us keep you informed about important news in your community. Subscriptions start at $6 a month.

If you need more convincing, read on.

Subscribers get benefits, including our ad-free e-edition and access to our private Slack and Facebook groups. We also strive to offer exclusive deals from our advertisers when those opportunities arise. The No. 1 benefit subscribers receive is continued coverage of the things that matter to you, like your city council meetings, restaurant openings, and community events.

We have undergone significant transitions in our company. Like many of you, we are faced with escalating costs of doing business, including what we pay our team and what we pay to run the site. We’ve also been working to find our stride since our longtime ad sales representative retired last fall. It hasn’t been easy, and your support is absolutely critical to allowing us to continue what we’re doing. If we don’t grow our subscribers, we will be faced with difficult choices in the weeks and months ahead.

We might have to start skipping important meetings and scaling back on covering events. That means fewer stories and fewer photos. You’ll be less informed about your community because we won’t have the resources to cover things at our current pace. When we’re short-staffed, we will be forced to focus on the easiest stories we can produce to boost our website traffic because we won’t have time to do much else.

We don’t want to become a clickbait-heavy, aggregation-dependent local news website, like so many other publications that have had to make do with fewer resources. We want to continue producing the quality news you value. This is not easy. If it were easy, more people would be doing it. But we feel what we do is important to our civic health.

Without timely local news, you miss out on so much. Have you ever stopped to think about what would happen if Decaturish simply vanished tomorrow? Who would tell you what’s going on at city hall or why the police were on your street this week? Would you depend on long Facebook and Nextdoor posts that haven’t been fact-checked, written by people who may not correct themselves if they get something wrong? Would you look to thinly reported stories in other publications that abandoned our community years ago?

Have you ever considered how many stories you wouldn’t know about if we weren’t here doing this five days a week (sometimes six or seven if things go sideways)? Would people know about the worker shortages in the Clarkston Police Department? Would they get regular updates about what’s going on at the school board meetings? Would they get to see in-depth reporting about inmate deaths at our county jail? Would you have any idea who is running for office in your local elections or what their positions are about the issues that matter to you?

We can point to so many instances, just within the last month, where Decaturish has provided value to our community. (Often, those stories provide value to other media outlets who pick up our stories without mentioning us.) As a site that doesn’t operate behind a paywall, we know it’s easy to take free community news for granted. And thanks to the 2,700-plus subscribers we have now, we aren’t in danger of disappearing tomorrow.

But we are in danger of not doing as much as we could be doing.

That’s the value you add to us through your subscriptions. For a mere $6 a month, you are ensuring your community stays in the loop about what’s happening. By supporting us, you’re supporting something truly worthwhile that’s happening in the place you call home.

Help us. Support us. Don’t let us lose a step. Let’s keep this thing going. Visit supportyourlocalnews.com and become a paying subscriber today.

And if you’re already a subscriber, please share this article, tell your friends that you support us, and tell them why.

OK, that’s enough sermonizing for today. Help us reach our goal this month, and I promise not to do this for another few months at least.

As always, thank you for reading and supporting Decaturish.

If you appreciate our work on this story, please become a paying supporter. For as little as $6 a month, you can help us keep you in the loop about your community. To become a supporter, click here.

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