The reality we’re facing

Editorial

The Canadian Jewish News announced last week that it will close. For more than 40 years, CJN has been an important voice of and to this country’s Jewish community, and a crucial contributor to the broader multicultural and interfaith conversation in Canada. The loss of this voice will have serious consequences.

It is hardly news that the newspaper industry has been body-slammed by a range of technological and demographic changes. From the largest to the smallest publications, economic challenges have been eating away at bottom lines and, in many cases, killing even long-established and beloved media sources.

The Jewish Independent has made no secret about the reality we face. For some weeks now we have been appealing to our community for help. The fate of the CJN is a possible portent for other community media, including this one. We need your support.

Market realities are undeniable, and the Independent has a bold plan for maximizing our impact on new media, while continuing the superb, multiple-award-winning journalism and commentary that has been an important voice for and helped share British Columbia’s Jewish community since 1930. (And even earlier, with copies extant from 1925.)

This newspaper is a business, not a charity. We cannot issue tax receipts for financial donations. However, we can assure readers that this “business” is also a labor of love that is, for almost all intents, a “nonprofit.” We are a service to this community – and, we believe, a vital and irreplaceable one – that receives no subsidies from the established agencies of the communal Jewish establishment. This has empowered us to be independent. But we are also mutually dependent on the community that we support and that supports us.

For more than eight decades, the Independent, and before it the Jewish Western Bulletin, has been the mirror through which this community sees itself, the townhall where we debate and discuss across our multitudinous differences, the rallying beacon for a million causes, the celebration of simchas and a place to come together to mourn and regroup. The paper has been many things to almost everyone in our community, inspiring laughter and rage, enlightenment and curiosity.

To leaf through the pages of decades past is to peruse one of the great success stories of Canadian multiculturalism. British Columbia’s Jewish community has grown and matured in so many ways, all of them chronicled in relentless week after week of hard work. In our pages are the names and stories of this community and its life. An issue of our paper is not superseded by the next week’s issue – it becomes part of an unending narrative of our people and our community.

Like any newspaper, advertising is our bread and butter. Like all newspapers, ad revenues have been suffering year after year due to competing, mostly electronic, media and resources. The Jewish Independent is adapting our media, even as we sustain and improve the quality of our journalism but, like a great many media outlets far more resourced than ours, we are on shaky ground. In order to effectively launch new media platforms, there must be revenue to support and maintain them.

In the days after the CJN’s sad announcement, a Facebook campaign of concerned community members garnered thousands of signatures. This level of outpouring indicates that the wider community understands the irreplaceable value of a community newspaper’s voice. Yet, as uplifting as the show of support is, signatures alone will not save our media institutions.

We are appealing – again – for your tangible support.

Subscribe. We urge you to subscribe, if you do not already, particularly to our more recently offered e-subscription. Consider gift e-subscriptions as well – especially for members of younger generations. Weddings, bar mitzvahs, birthdays and other simchas are opportunities to make a statement about continuing and shared ideas by giving a gift that inspires learning, discussion and debate. What could be a more Jewish gift? E-subscriptions allow you to download the paper every week from no matter where in the world you are, to save issues without contributing to clutter, to increase font size for those with sight challenges, to read the paper in a more environmentally sustainable format and to print out individual stories and announcements that matter to you.

Advertise with us. We remain a crucial and unique conduit to a vital consumer demographic. While there are plenty of alternative places for your marketing dollars, there may be none that offer both the power of reaching our desirable readership and the ability to strengthen our community simultaneously.

Patronize our advertisers. Tell them you saw them in the JI and that you appreciate their efforts in strengthening Jewish learning, news and commentary. Urge your friends to speak up, too.

And, again, we exhibit appropriate chutzpah in asking for your financial support as a vital community institution that may be the only one to which you have never directly contributed. Thank you to those who have already heeded our call and made generous contributions.

We hope you agree that our mission is important. If you do, please help ensure that it continues.

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