PROPOSAL TO TERMINATE
THE PRINT NEWSLETTER
By: JT - ROCKS!
This is a response to a proposal from the Chiefs which
appears in this newsletter. The proposal addresses a
projected financial shortfall in the East Bay Circle of
Men by eliminating a service to some of our
members. Specifically, by ending the publication and
mailing of the hard-copy print version of the
newsletter to those 27 members who prefer to
receive it that way.
A bit of history about the newsletter:
For about the first 20 years of EBNOM, the publishing
team of the month would put the newsletter together
at Copy World using cut-and-paste technology. The
team handed the completed pages to the guys behind
the desk, then walked to Bangkok Thai for dinner.
They returned to Copy World, stuffed the newsletters
into envelopes, and mailed it out to everybody.
About 12 years ago, I started publishing the
newsletter online. It was a fairly simple process. I
scanned the printed version of the newsletter,
converted those PDFs into JPEGs, and put it up on the
EBNOM site as a web gallery. At the time, Photoshop
contained a nice little web gallery that was easy to
use.
Over the years, more and more men opted to read
the newsletter online instead of receiving the print
copy by mail. And, by the way, that has saved
EBNOM/EBCOM literally thousands of dollars over the
years. It has added a lot more to the kitty than the
$100 or $200 we sometimes get from “profit” on the
camp-out or the fall event. (I only mention this to give
myself a little street cred for when it comes time to
talk about the money.)
Three or four years ago, a guy named Mark Dungey
took over as Newsletter Wallah. Dungey's idea was to
put the newsletter together digitally, which he
managed to do for a few issues. (His girlfriend
commented that the newsletter looked like it had
been put together by a bunch of sixth graders. Which
was more or less true.
One problem was, he wanted to do the whole thing
all by himself every month. Not a sustainable program
over the long run. And he got a lot of resistance from
the publishing teams, perhaps because they didn’t
like having the process taken away from them.
Dungey ended up quitting as Newsletter Wallah and
leaving EBNOM altogether.
But those newsletters really looked great! One reason
was, they were being printed directly from digital files
instead of from scans of printed content. The photos
in particular were crisper.
When Dungey left, I picked up the Newsletter Wallah
stick again. I thought, Hmm… that digitally-produced
newsletter was an improvement! I wonder if the
publishing team could gather around a computer and
put the newsletter together there instead of going to
Copy World?
So in 2019 I began working with the teams to do just
that. Just making it up as we went along. It turned out
to be not completely satisfying as a team meeting,
because one man ended up doing most of the work
while the others sat around with nothing to do.
Then, in March 2020, the pandemic hit, and meeting
at Copy World was out of the question. The only way
to put the newsletter together was one guy sitting
alone at his computer. Fortunately, by that time,
there was a man on every team who knew how to do
it.
For the last three years, I’ve been working with the
Newsletter Wallahs to make the digital process
simpler for the publishing team. And I’ve been
continuously clarifying the instruc-tions for how to do
it. http://tiny.cc/ebcomoct
The pandemic has cooled down, and copy shops have
upgraded their scanners and printers, so it’s now
possible for teams to get together and cut and paste
the newsletter “old school.” And it looks pretty good!
The Journey-Men did it in October.
http://tiny.cc/ebcomoct So that’s an option for your
team.
