If you are a WA Free Press paper subscriber, you will receive a letter enclosed with issue #100. It explains how to convert your paper subscription to a web subscription, or how to get a prorated refund. For new web subscriptions, see our subscription page.

A Farewell To Print

by Doug Collins, editor 

The WA Free Press is taking a big step after this issue. We are going to stop issuing a print version and post only online. This issue, number 100, is our last paper issue.

I first started feeling uncomfortable with all the work I was doing in print when I realized something very simple: I myself was already shifting toward doing the large majority of my reading online, and many WA Free Press readers have certainly been doing the same.

Although subscriptions for almost all print media have been declining in recent years, our decision to go web-only is just as much due to the constraints of volunteer time. Basically, it’s double the work to produce both a decent website and a decent printed publication. It’s better to concentrate our work on the website. 

In fact, I can’t really figure out if this publication is a victim or a beneficiary of the internet. There are both disadvantages and advantages of this change.

The advantages include much less time spent on mailings, and no more weighty bundles of paper. There is also the quicker relaying of information, and a readership from people around the world. Perhaps the internet also saves a tree or two. Mostly, though, the internet is fun. It’s my dream-come-true.

In about 1974, my childhood fantasy was to have a magic projector in my bedroom that could answer any trivia question I put to it by projecting the answer on my wall. Well, the internet is about as close to that as I could ever hope for. It’s like a big, magical brain with a screen.

On the other hand, the disadvantages of going web-only include not having the satisfaction of seeing someone in my neighborhood reading a copy of the WA Free Press in a cafe or on a park bench. It’s nice knowing that he or she is considering—at that moment—the under-reported topics that all of our writers have been striving so hard to get out. You can’t witness that happening on the internet.

Another regret is that many of our prisoner subscribers (and other readers with no computer access) will no longer have access to new WA Free Press articles. For years, we have offered free mailed subscriptions to incarcerated people, and I’ll miss receiving their appreciative letters. We’ll strive to be accessible to prisoners when possible in other ways in the future.

The web is generally less social. I’ll no longer regularly see the great people at the printing company we’ve used for years.

Regardless of the pluses and minuses, issue number 100 is a good milestone to make this change. It feels satisfying, like something has been completed. 

The WA Free Press has a long history with the internet, if that’s possible to say. It was among the first periodicals to have a viable website. Our pioneering first webmaster—though that term hadn’t been coined yet—was Matt Robesch, who steered the site to receive a number of web-related awards in the mid 1990s (see wafreepress.org/Web.html). The article posts on our website stretch all the way back to 1993 (see wafreepress.org/back.shtml), and still show the original “cutting edge” web design of that era, an era when internet commerce was still taboo among most web geeks (hard to imagine now).

Managing a long-lived website is probably a bit like managing a library. Many small things need to be fixed and sometimes updated. The readership of our website—much like at a library—is just as much of the older articles as it is of the newer ones. As the “library” gets bigger, it naturally demands more attention.

I’ve done the major print editing and layout for the majority of this newspaper’s lifetime of 16 years, and I modestly (a-hem) feel that it’s been a Herculean effort, though it wouldn’t have been possible without the help of dozens of others.  One example is John Ambrosavage, who was our main cartoonist in the early years and who has again contributed his humor to this issue to mark the occasion.

The chief success of our “journalistic activism” has been that we’ve produced and distributed a newspaper—an often outspokenly iconoclastic one—which has been almost completely funded by subscriptions and donations. It has not had the editorial constraints that advertisement unspokenly places on papers. That’s no easy accomplishment.

Fortunately, the same lack of constraint is even more possible on the web, and without all the extra work of printing and distributing. Let’s cross our fingers that the web stays that way.

Some people might think that going from print to web-only is like the passage from life to death. Well, if there is an afterlife that is as fun and intriguing and open as the internet, then I suppose we all have something to look forward to.•