The NewStandard is closing up shop

Text of email I received today regarding the online news publication The NewStandard:

Dear Peter,

We regret to announce that, after nearly 3 and a half years online, we will discontinue publication of The NewStandard this Friday.

As those familiar with us or our work can imagine, this was a tremendously difficult decision for us to reach. But the five staffers who form the PeoplesNetWorks Collective – the nonhierarchical nonprofit that publishes TNS – have accepted that the news publication we envisioned cannot be achieved without a greater level of support. We do not believe we will be able to obtain that support in the foreseeable future, and as individuals, we have reached a point at which we are unable to sustain the long hours and stress that publishing TNS entails.

We will write at greater length next week to reflect upon our efforts to build TNS, discussing in detail what led to this saddest of conclusions. For now, we wanted to announce our decision and explain what it will mean for you in the immediate term.

On April 27, we will publish the last edition of The NewStandard. We will then begin the process of shutting down our operations. We intend to continue accepting regular monthly donations from our Premium Members until the end of April, in order to keep publishing for the rest of the month. By May 1, we will cease all credit card charges.

We are currently working on plans to establish an online archive of all TNS content, and we will do all we can to ensure that readers can continue to access past articles for years to come.

Individually, the people who have brought you TNS since 2004 will no doubt move on to other media and social change projects. Nonetheless, the closure of this groundbreaking publication – unique both for its product and for its radical structure and democratic values -- will be deeply felt by us all.

We are so proud of what you have helped us accomplish. For more than three years, we showed that a group of young journalists could uphold the highest standards in news reporting, institute a remarkably equitable workplace and organizational structure, and all the while, never even contemplate selling out to advertisers or other special interests.

For various reasons, we never gained the level of support we needed to provide sustainable jobs and to develop the readership we had aimed for. But we will leave in our wake nearly 3,000 examples of excellent public-interest journalism -- each one a small but indelible mark of achievement in a field wracked with mediocrity, pettiness and criminality.

We want to thank everyone who recognized the special value of an operation like TNS and helped us make it happen by donating, passing our stories along to other readers and agitating for a better news media. Your support for our work has meant everything to us.

Many of you will no doubt wish to respond. We intend to reply individually to everyone who contacts us. However, please understand that for the remainder of this week and the coming weekend, we will be in production and shut-down mode, continuing to produce content and then wrap up our operations. We will provide a more detailed explanation of our decision next week. Until then, we appreciate your patience in waiting for further information or replies from us.

In the meantime, you can send reactions, questions and comments to respond@newstandardnews.net. Please indicate if you would like to have your remarks made public.

Sincerely,
Jessica Azulay
Michelle Chen
Brian Dominick
Shreema Mehta
Megan Tady 

This is a sad day for me since I have supported them since their beginnings and believed them to be an objective, non-commercial, non-corporate voice in investigative journalism. The website may have seemed to be left-leaning, but any journalism worth its salt is going to subvert the dominant paradigm, which lately seems to be corporate/capitalist (read: fascist). In fact, they have always reported in favor of information for citizens - not merely for consumers. It is a coincidence that just yesterday I placed a NewStandard link in the news feed column of this blog.--Pete