Since we’re subscriber-funded, it’s subscribers who make what we do possible – and we hope you’ll stick with us.
It’s been more than three years since we have raised our subscription rates, and a lot has changed since then.
We’re still focused on bringing you quality, original journalism you can’t get anywhere else, about Dublin City Council, housing, homelessness, transport, arts, and food. But after consulting with readers last year on what else you’d like us to write about, we’ve also added regular coverage of immigrant life in the city.
We’re still independent – and now perhaps even more so, as we’ve stopped selling advertisements entirely, and now can rely on our more than 2,000 subscribers for the revenue we need to pay our journalists and cover our other expenses.
We’ve been able to increase our staff salaries from the minimum wage to the living wage, as well as significantly pushing up freelance rates. This is a tough, skilled job and we want to pay people as much as we can to do it.
We’re still running at a bit of a loss month-to-month (covered by a bank loan), but we don’t want to scale back our ambitions. We’re a tiny organisation, with only three full-time staff, and there’s so much more we want to do.
So we’re raising the cost of subscriptions by €1 per month, making Digital subscriptions €6/month, and Digital + Print subscriptions €9/month.
If you are already a subscriber, after 15 December, whenever your billing cycle ends and your subscription automatically renews, it will do so at the new rate. We really appreciate your support – since we’re subscriber-funded, it’s subscribers who make what we do possible – and we hope you’ll stick with us.
Our aim is still to keep subscriptions affordable, to not price anybody out, and to grow our number of subscribers, so that everybody chips in a little. But we hope you’ll understand why we’re making this change.
Nudging up our rates will help us move closer to closing the gap between our income and our expenses, and allow us to:
1) Grow our climate coverage. We operate as a worker’s co-op and at our latest meeting we decided as a team that the best way for us to do this is, in the short-run, to try to integrate more climate coverage across all our beats (housing, transport, etc.), while also commissioning more coverage of climate issues from freelancers. In the long-run, we hope to add another staff member, who would focus on climate/energy/environment issues in the city. This price increase will help cover the additional freelance costs now, and move us closer to adding the additional staff position in future.
2) Raise salaries and freelance rates slightly at the start of January 2022. We have committed to salaries of at least the living wage, the rate for which is due to go up at the start of next year.
We know that people are in different situations, and we don’t want to price anyone out of reading us, so if this increase is too much, please do get in touch at lois@dublininquirer.com and we’ll give you a rate that works for you.
Also, if you wish to contribute more than €6/month or €9/month, you can reach me at lois@dublininquirer.com, or if you log into the website and scroll to the bottom of the home page, there should be a “become a patron” option available to you.
Thanks so much,
Lo Kapila
Editor
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