"Stay well—keep on."
—Pete Seeger, letter or January 21, 2009 (Enc.: check for
$18.95 subscription)
No we are not going to shoot the dog. Not under any
circumstance. As for the magazine: We have received enough encouragement from
you, our readers, and from the community at large—thanks to our advertisers,
writers, printers, and many others—to press on with as much optimism as anyone
in the print magazine business could, doing it in the here and now.
My optimism is inspired by the sheer number of you who have
already subscribed, based on your great expectations for this magazine (please
see the Letters page)—as well as the landslide of people who've told us they were going to subscribe (but haven't quite
gotten around to it yet). If you're one of the former: Thank you. If you're one
of the latter: Come on, do it today. We're not letting go of InsideOut, and
we're betting you won't either.
Put another way, if you're not paying for copies of your
(local, we hope indispensable) magazine, your publisher will eventually have to
skimp on reporting, or still believes that stalwart local advertisers will (or
can) shoulder the entire cost of producing a high-quality publication. But that
publishing model is an old, quite possibly defunct, idea. And therefore, I'm
not going to stop asking readers to subscribe: You are crucial.
So with guarded optimism in these gloomy days, we are going
to keep doing what we're doing. Because no one has given us permission to stop;
and I suppose just as importantly, what people say they want is what we want:
to continue doing what we love in this place we're (mostly) rapturous about.
As I write today, winter is making its last stand with a
snowstorm blanketing the capital district and Hudson Valley. But our favorite
frozen river is flowing free and iceless. And once the ice starts to thaw, once
you see that river rolling at this time of year, you know that (at least until
three warmer seasons have passed), it won't freeze over again.
And like our mighty river, when you read the stories of the
people we chronicle, you'll see an underpinning of that same possibility
running through these pages. It's a clear current.
One aspect of this magazine that amazes readers is how we who
we get for our exclusive interviews. The long and short of it is this: People
from everywhere– local and national—talk to us because they can count on
getting a fair shake, because we actually read their books, because we go in
person to visit, because we listen to them. We do our homework, and we're truly
interested (yes—even, or maybe even especially, in people like Ann Coulter).
People intuitively understand that you can't feign curiosity.
What one of them (star New York Times reporter David E.
Sanger) didn't immediately understand during our telephone interview was a
sudden, deafening noise in the background. Frankly, I was a little reluctant to
confess that it was a pack of gray squirrels holding a roller derby in the
rafters above my desk. Then somewhere in the middle of our conversation—I think
Sanger was explaining why we need to be concerned about Pakistan's economy—the
ruckus reached a concert-like crescendo with concert-like volume—and I came
clean. David thought I was kidding at first, until the squirrels reached yet
another record decibel level. Every day's a party when you're a rodent, I
guess. But there it is. And there he was. Amused.
During this interlude, I explained to David that Pakistan would
be the least of our worries if the squirrels gnawed through our electrical wires
and burned our cabin office to the ground. Looks like we'll be getting a Havarat
trap, first one we’ve needed in years. We're not going to shoot the squirrels,
either.
