What’s going on

What’s going on?

Monday was kind of crazy around here. We announced that we are ceasing printing of our beloved VITAL Source, effective immediately, which in turn led to a (bigger than we expected) flood of emails, phone calls and damage control.

But wait… immediately? Seems kind of sudden, doesn’t it? Seems so to us as well, but it’s like this… pardon the descent to metaphor, it’s one of my favorite literary devices and I’m short on time this morning.

We went into 2008 with a burlap bag that had a little sand in the bottom. The sand represents revenue and resources. Over the year we filled it up pretty well for the first time, the customary numerous tiny rips seemingly repaired at long last. Then in late fall, we started to see signs of stress on our poor burlap receptacle. As the grains started to trickle out of a new little tear, we found ways to plug the hole or use less sand. Then suddenly, near the end of the year, we were faced with a couple of MAJOR cost increases. Which created a rip in the other side of the bag.

Now there was a hole in each side of the bag and not enough sand coming in to keep it heavy. So we looked at every aspect of our bag and what caused it to rip most often. Sadly, it was producing the magazine in print form. Our printing costs increased dramatically January 1 and our revenue was somewhat weak – not terrible, but not enough for a small business with limited resources. The other parts of the business are still doing pretty well but the losses from the magazine would have ultimately emptied the bag entirely unless the economy magically turned around in less than a year. Which it’s not going to do. So we made a difficult decision.

In actuality, this only affects the timing of an already-existing bigger plan. The new web portal we will now launch in February instead of April has been long in the planning and we would have liked to have done both simultaneously for awhile to see how the two worked together. But as unfunded operators with no desire to take on additional debt in these uncertain times, we had to make a choice: keep shoring it up and hope for the best or use our small reserves to follow through with our plan.

We chose the future over the present. Our new site will be a forum for many voices within the community, expanding on the great base we’ve already built. We’ll continue to offer most of what was best about VITAL Source – SubVersions, REEL Milwaukee, Chow Baby!, One World, Stripwax, Talk Derby to Me, my column, What’s Happenin’ Milwaukee and more. We’ll also continue to steward Fan-Belt, Milwaukee’s most excellent independent music blog.

And who knows? Maybe you’ll see VITAL Source Magazine on the streets again. Maybe sooner than you think.