That's a good question. The last time I read the rules on this, officers required "access" to the kingdom newsletter. That meant an associate membership was fine if somebody else at your residence was a sustaining member -- the household shares the newsletter. Now, with the electronic newsletter being tied to an individual user's login, I don't know how that will work.
You might want to ask the board: comments@sca.org.
I guess there's something I don't quite get: if the corporation has a deficit, couldn't they just change the membership rates, period, or do something else to help fix it?
I dunno, I'm not part of the situation though so it's hard to quite understand.
It's a really big deficit. They've already raised membership rates twice in the last year.
At least part of the deficit is because they're defending a lawsuit that, if they lose, could result in a humongous judgment against them. (It involves allegations of sexual misconduct by an officer with children. This is the civil suit. Whee.)
Yeah, I saw that coming. I ask again, as I have been asking for the last 20 years- what the heck do they do with all that money? If there is a deficit now and there wasn't in the past, I'd sure like to know what has changed.
They've been wasting money for 20 years (you can read the high-level financial statements now, thanks in part to the mandamus suit, but there's not a lot of detail.) What's changed more recently is at least one lawsuit involving misconduct of a children's officer.
why have an online newsletter at all when you can just get the information from the web site? People asked us (and we asked ourselves this) when the Althing went online. The main answer was that local groups are required to have a newsletter, so we do. Though, there are things in the newsletter that aren't online, like articles, artwork, letters from the officers, meeting minutes, etc. I'm not sure how many people read it, but it is worth reading. I imagine the Kingdom newsletter will shake out roughly the same way
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You don't seem defensive, and I hope I don't either.
Here's the thing: for an online delivery vehicle, a PDF newsletter is pretty far down on the usability scale. We should put the event announcements, letters from officers, articles, etc. on the web site as first-class items. We already do this for event announcements and some articles (the bios started out in the Althing). Why create an index of PDF files to find specific content instead of just indexing the content directly? If I want to find a particular court report of set of meeting minutes, isn't it easier to go to the "court reports" or "minutes" page and choose the event/date from there? (I read the online newsletter when it comes out, at least most of the time, but I never refer to old issues -- in case you were wondering.)
Now since paper newsletters are also being produced, I totally understand why we post a PDF. You have to do the work anyway; why not? But duplicate work is being done and -- demonstrably -- not all of the content is making it to the web site
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Was there any information given showing the actual costs of printing and mailing hardcopy newsletters? The couple of kingdom chroniclers I talked to recently (not at Pennsic) indicated that their offices were running very close to the edge of insolvency and expected to be considerably in the red after the next postal rate increase. I can understand why the BoD was reluctant to raise membership rates again if they could avoid it; from that perspective, going paperless (with what I too fully expect will be a surcharge for hardcopy) makes sense.
That is only one aspect of the question, of course. The "saved costs" of not sending stipends to kingdom chroniclers are basically found money, which is being used to deal with deficits (rather than using all or part to drop the sustaining membership rate); that aspect is already being discussed elsewhere on the comments to this post.
I haven't seen that data recently. (I mean, I was very familiar with it back when I was a kingdom chronicler, but that's not recent. Back then the stipend covered the cost of the baseline newsletter; we did fund-raising to be able to do extra goodies like more articles and an annual A&S issue.)
I do know that earlier this year the corporation substantially cut the stipend to the kingdom chroniclers, such that our kingdom needs to either fund-raise or massively scale back in order to meet the current obligations for paper newsletters. So they've already started diverting money paid for newsletter subscriptions elsewhere. I don't know what the chroniclers are currently getting.
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You might want to ask the board: comments@sca.org.
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I dunno, I'm not part of the situation though so it's hard to quite understand.
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At least part of the deficit is because they're defending a lawsuit that, if they lose, could result in a humongous judgment against them. (It involves allegations of sexual misconduct by an officer with children. This is the civil suit. Whee.)
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Here's the thing: for an online delivery vehicle, a PDF newsletter is pretty far down on the usability scale. We should put the event announcements, letters from officers, articles, etc. on the web site as first-class items. We already do this for event announcements and some articles (the bios started out in the Althing). Why create an index of PDF files to find specific content instead of just indexing the content directly? If I want to find a particular court report of set of meeting minutes, isn't it easier to go to the "court reports" or "minutes" page and choose the event/date from there? (I read the online newsletter when it comes out, at least most of the time, but I never refer to old issues -- in case you were wondering.)
Now since paper newsletters are also being produced, I totally understand why we post a PDF. You have to do the work anyway; why not? But duplicate work is being done and -- demonstrably -- not all of the content is making it to the web site ( ... )
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That is only one aspect of the question, of course. The "saved costs" of not sending stipends to kingdom chroniclers are basically found money, which is being used to deal with deficits (rather than using all or part to drop the sustaining membership rate); that aspect is already being discussed elsewhere on the comments to this post.
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I do know that earlier this year the corporation substantially cut the stipend to the kingdom chroniclers, such that our kingdom needs to either fund-raise or massively scale back in order to meet the current obligations for paper newsletters. So they've already started diverting money paid for newsletter subscriptions elsewhere. I don't know what the chroniclers are currently getting.
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