[Artemisia] Newsletter Production Stipends

[Daniel Watson]

I think the best approach, given that the kingdom newsletter will eventually go electronic, is to have local groups decide how they want handle it.  Perhaps a group will decide that paper copies of the kingdom newsletter are important enough to print and mail to individuals, or at least to individuals that request them.  I think this can be done either as a part of the group's budget, or as a for-fee service to recoup costs.

I think it is also quite likely that an enterprising individual will step forward who will be happy to provide this service for a modest fee.  

But the real argument here is about money.  SCA-corporate, faced with a revenue stream that does not cover its obligations, has only two tools at its disposal:  raise fees or reduce services.  In this case, it has chosen the latter, and the service it is cutting is the printing and mailing of newsletters.

If I did not have access to email or the internet, I am certain I would be unhappy about this.  But the only effective way the SCA can continue to meet its obligations without dramatic cost-cutting will be for it to raise the membership fees to cover its increased costs.   Presumably and perhaps over-simplistically, fees would be raised to cover the cost of printing and mailing newsletters.

I have a problem with that.  I don't mind so much if my membership fees go up for something we need, but I'm not so keen on fee increases foisted on me because we must *all* receive increasingly expensive paper copies of newsletters that contain information that could more easily be sent to my inbox  at a fraction of the cost using electrons that are easy to recycle.

Especially not when, for the effort of clicking a "print" button, it is possible to turn an electronic newsletter into a paper newsletter using a font-size of our choosing that can be brought to shire meetings or dropped into an envelope.  There is no "unprint" button.


-bart