Selling out
On my way back home from
my twice-a-year pilgrimage to Steamboat Springs, I encountered
a sign somewhere between the small Western Slope outposts
of Bond and McCoy: “Freedom isn’t Free.”
The message itself is hardly novel – cliche some
may argue. However, as with any cliche, it’s worth
repeating because of the strong implication it has –
one that come Monday morning still resounded in my head.
As I returned to work, I opened my e-mails to find a
few letters from readers decrying an ad we ran from the
developers of River Trails Ranch. I can’t say the
letters
were a surprise. When we made the decision to run the
ad – one that was not entered into lightly –
we knew there would be dissension. We knew that some folks
who view us as the champions of open space, free thinking,
anti-development and idealism would see it as an affront.
Sell-outs they would call us, or worse. We cringed at
the thought. However, we cringed even more at the sight
of our seemingly endless stack of bills. And, after weighing
the pros and cons, we decided to run the ad.
You see, much like the aforementioned hackneyed quote,
free papers aren’t necessarily free. There’s
the weekly four-digit print bill, rent, utilities and
payroll – something that Will Sands and I, as owners/editors/publishers/writers/receptionists/delivery
schleps, hope to someday be a part of. True, we may be
alive after a year in the business, but it is not without
losing a good deal of blood, so to speak. In other words,
we are like other fledgling business owners and we have
mortgages to pay and hungry little mouths to feed.
Furthermore, not running the ad would create a quandary
of another sort: Where to draw the line. If we refuse
one developer’s ad, should be refuse them all? And
what about the local ski resorts and ski areas, who are
frequent contributors to these pages. Sure they sell recreation,
which we like, but they also are not without their share
of controversy, from ski area expansion to ambitious real
estate developments. That, of course, cascades into real
estate brokering, which facilitates the buying and selling
of such developments, not to mention mortgage brokers,
who supply the money. And if we include mortgage brokers,
why not banks? But why stop here? Perhaps we should shun
the car dealers, who, it can be argued, indirectly contribute
to global warming by selling automobiles. And then there’s
the pizza guys who contribute to the landfill problem
with the production of cardboard boxes and the coffee
shops who do likewise with paper cups.
OK, so you can see where I’m going with this purely
hypothetical argument. If we begin to exclude everyone
based on some ideal or another, sure, we’ll be on
high moral ground, the only problem is, we’ll be
financially marooned there.
The second point of all this hyperbole is to enlighten
people to the fact that we are not funded by anything
other than advertising. There is no Knight; there is no
Ridder. Just a few working fools, some drained savings
accounts and a couple of maxed-out platinum cards. Although
we would love to be in the business of rejecting ads not
to our liking, it is not a possibility at this juncture
in our short and checkered history.
To their credit, those who wrote did admit they understood
this situation. “Pass around the hat at the coffeehouse,”
one proposed as a solution. A noble idea for sure, but
it would have to be a very large hat to hold all the loose
change if the typical coffee house patron is anything
like myself.
Perhaps a better solution is for people to take their
hard-earned money and spend it on themselves – provided
they do so with our advertisers. That way, they’re
supporting businesses that, in turn, support us.
For those who feel cheated by the inability to express
their views with advertising, we offer another avenue--the
humble pen. Advertising in our paper may cost money, but
writing a letter to the editor does not. Just like an
ad, you can say anything you want (barring personal attacks)
and, no matter how asinine, radical or inflammatory, we’ll
print it. So whether you detest River Trails Ranch, this
editorial or just want to vent over New Mexico drivers
or the rising cost of a 12-pack, allow these pages to
be your forum. All you’ve got to do is get it to
us in a reasonably legible format (hell, it can even be
scrawled on a cocktail napkin for all we care), and we’ll
make sure it gets into the hot little hands of 5,000 of
your fellow citizens. And best of all, it’s 100
percent, unequivocally, absolutely, positively free of
charge – thanks of course to the support of our
advertisers.
How’s that for free thinking?
-Missy Votel
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