Six years ago this June, in a small garden shed in the back of my house on Calvert Street, I pushed a button on my computer to publicly launch The Chestertown Spy for the first time.
It was hard to predict at that moment how this new online news source would be received. While I had been involved in Chestertown since I first came to Washington College as a freshman in the fall of 1974, and later returned in the 1980s to serve as its vice president for college relations and development, there was no indication that anyone, besides loyal friends and family, would find this new Spy, named after the original Chestertown Spy of 1793, useful and interesting.
That first week seemed to confirm the worst. Less than 150 readers found their way to the website, and with little or no marketing money available, the odds that the Spy might rise to a legitimate and credible news source for public affairs, the arts, and local culture, seemed increasingly like a delusional dream on my part.
Nonetheless, with the help of some very distinguished retired journalists like John Lang, Gil Watson, and Bill Chaze, and a handful of remarkable freelance talents such as Jean Sanders, Nancy Taylor Robson, Liz Richards Janega, Kurt Kolaja, Kelly Parisi Castro, and Mary McCoy, as well as one very unemployed nephew, Chris Metzloff, all working, it should be noted for almost no compensation, the Spy marched on.
It also took six months for the Spy to find its first sponsors. Both Cross Street Realtors and Chesapeake Architects were the first to sign on, both of whom shared the same blind faith as the Spy’s writers, that this little newspaper could indeed play an important role in the life of a small community.
Fast forward to June of 2015, and it is unmistakably clear that the Spy has evolved into a critically important part of the social and economic ecosystem of the greater Chestertown community. Rather than 200 readers a week in 2009, that number has risen to 5,576 unique readers a week, or just about 500 more people than actually live in Chestertown.
And our sponsors have grown just as dramatically. From those lonely days with Cross Street and ChesArch, the Spy now averages thirty organizations or businesses each month that support the newspaper.
While these results are extremely gratifying, in order for the Chestertown Spy to have a long-term future, with a sustainable operating budget, we must now ask for the support of its readers as well.
From the moment the Spy was created, it has been part of our charter never to charge readers a subscription fee. While there has been some financial incentives to do so, a subscription-based business model would disrupt the very nature of the Spy’s mission. Our goal is to become the primary news source for Chestertown with no paywalls. We want everyone and anyone to have access to news and critical information about their community as part of our primary educational purpose.
Nonetheless, we do hope that some of our readers will help with the Spy’s costs of publication on a voluntary basis periodically.
And we will be starting that effort on June 26 at the Garfield Center with some very special friends of the Spy performing a community recital of T.S. Eliot’s epic poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”
Why Eliot and why Prufrock? It turns out my maternal grandfather published that poem in Poetry Magazine in 1915. It was the first time Eliot had been published in the United States, and the poem itself became universally praised for single-handedly launching modern 20th century poetry. It was a remarkable event in American literature, but it made no money for the publishers then nor since it arrived on newsstands in June of that year, precisely one hundred years ago. It was just the right thing to do for poetry then, as much as I think it has been the right thing to do for Chestertown to support the creation of the Spy.
On behalf of the Chestertown Spy’s team of editors and writers, we sincerely hope that a portion of our annual unique readership of 200,000 will understand this important case for support. With their help and yours, we see a very bright future for the Spy, capable of having its own hundred years of service to the community it loves.
Dave Wheelan
Publisher & Executive Editor
The Chestertown Spy
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