We hope you have a great holiday and we’ll be back in early January
WELL, it’s been another fantastic year at CommonSpace.
We’re now just over three years old, and we have more support than we’ve ever had. For the first time this year, we launched a fundraising campaign aimed specifically at raising money for CommonSpace to enable us to add to our team.
As our readers and supporters know, CommonSpace is funded entirely by Common Weal, which is funded entirely by its supporters (although – and as the editor I’m always eager to point this out emphatically – we are editorially independent). For three years this model has worked brilliantly for us, but we realised that when Common Weal is funding so many different projects, we’d need to start our own fundraising efforts in order to expand what we’re doing and make an even bigger impact on the Scottish media.
I’m absolutely thrilled to say that we were quite overwhelmed by just how many of our supporters became monthly subscribers. We had expected to raise more through one-off donations, but we were delighted to see that our readers and supporters want to make a much more long term commitment than that.
The way we see it, we’re just a vehicle; our supporters are trusting us with their money and whatever resources they can offer because they believe in the power of CommonSpace to elevate voices that struggle to be heard, to tell a different story about Scotland instead of the same old cliches and stereotypes, and – very importantly – to champion the ability of all of us in Scotland to make our own choices and create a fairer country through Scottish independence.
And so, thanks to the incredible support we’ve had this year, we’re not only adding to our number, we’re creating a brand new position. In the new year, we’ll be taking on our first ever news editor. The news editor will work closely with the reporting team to make our news content the best, most relevant and original it can be.
This addition to the team will also allow me to focus on developing everything else we do at CommonSpace. I can spend more time making our opinion and magazine sections even better, and I can devote much more resource to finding the important voices in Scotland we haven’t heard yet.
But we’re not finished there. We’re optimistic that we’ll be adding yet more to our number during 2018. We’re well on our way to doubling the capacity we originally started with, and that’s an incredible achievement for a new media model with no advertising revenue, no big donors and no sponsorship.
We are truly independent. CommonSpace was created by you, and we work as hard as we possibly can to make a media that Scotland can be proud of.
As well as our fundraising campaign, we’ve continued providing work experience placements for secondary school, college and university students and, well, whoever wants one! We know how imortant it is to try and change the media on the inside as well as the output, and we’re constantly working on a number of fronts to do that.
The only downfall we really have is that we spend so much time doing all of this that we barely get the time to let our readers and supporters know just how much we’re actually achieving.
So we’ll definitely be changing that next year and making a huge fuss and lots of noise about what can be achieved when we all get our heads down, roll our sleeves up and work together to make things better. In Scotland we’re tired of not reaching our potential and knowing things aren’t as good as they could be. That’s why we’re changing it. We’re getting things done. CommonSpace is evidence of that.
So after some hard graft, the CommonSpace team is now heading off on a well deserved Christmas break. We’ll resume publishing on 5 January, and we’ll be excited to welcome our new team members in the new year.
Three years after Scotland’s independence referendum, we’re the strongest we’ve ever been, and we’re already prepared to knock 2018 right out the park.
Look at how important CommonSpace has become, and how vital it is for the future #SupportAReporter