In this week’s issue, you will find an eight-page Sac Pride News. You may ask, “What is this doing in SN&R?” And even if you are not asking, I’ve got an answer for you.
The Sac Pride News, and the radio show Sac Pride Live on Talk 650 KSTE (Saturday nights at 10 p.m.), are the creations of Tyler Edwards, Kevin Manz and Todd Lohse, along with Jovi Radtke. This energetic, dedicated group is putting their heart, soul and a significant amount of money into bringing a voice to the Sacramento LGBTQQIA (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex, ally) community.
And we at SN&R are a part of this project. They have rented space in our building. We are helping them produce their publication. We also distribute it in nearly 80,000 copies of SN&R. We hope that by taking advantage of SN&R’s established distribution, their paper has a better chance to thrive in these challenging times.
We like having new voices in the paper. We do not control their content. But we believe many of our current readers will like it. And we hope some new readers will start picking up SN&R because of this expanded coverage.
What if Sac Pride News writes a story that I disagree with? I’m prepared for that. Our reporters and editors regularly write stories that I disagree with. I would not have it any other way.
The point of the paper, in my view, is not to have a narrow position, but rather to have a wide-ranging community dialogue, where different points of view and different voices are heard.
This has been one of our major goals since the very beginning. We wanted to broaden the community dialogue. We wanted to let a greater number of voices be heard, particularly voices that have been excluded from or ignored by traditional media. This is why I let the conservative Sacramento Union weekly newspaper insert into our paper. It would have never inserted SN&R into its paper. I didn’t agree with most of its positions, but it added another voice to the mix that our readers heard from in the pages of the weekly SN&R.
For similar reasons, we are building a new publications division at the News & Review. This new division helps nonprofits, government agencies and some businesses tell their story with an eight- or 12-page mininewspaper. We use our core competency of taking a complicated and often confusing message and presenting it in simplified stories that help people gain real understanding. We have produced more than a hundred of these publications for very happy clients. This work is aligned with our mission. It is another way to add additional voices to the conversation.
We hope you enjoy Sac Pride News. And even if you don’t, we hope you enjoy living in a town that continues to involve a greater number of people in a community dialogue.
