SCA kingdom newsletters

[cellio]

SCA Inc. announced earlier this year that kingdom newsletters will be moving to electronic format next year. (PDF, it was clarified at the Pennsic BoD meet&greet.) People who want paper will still be able to get it; while pricing hadn't been determined as of the Pennsic discussion, the sense I got was that there would be an extra charge for this.

Do you see what they did there?

There are two primary levels of membership, associate ($30) and sustaining ($45). The difference between the two is that with the latter you get your kingdom newsletter. The vast majority of that $15 difference goes to the cost of printing and mailing that newsletter. I edited a kingdom newsletter for four years (about 15-20 years ago, ack, but I've talked with more recent chroniclers and it hasn't changed much) and saw this process up close.

So now, your $45 membership will get you access to online newsletters (all of them, I learned at Pennsic), whose incremental hosting costs are tiny, and if you want paper you'll pay more than that (beyond the sustaining membership). Meanwhile, the kingdom chroniclers who are donating their labor for a break-even proposition now, out of deep caring for their kingdoms and the satisfaction of a job well done, will instead be donating that labor for the corporate bottom line. The directors at Pennsic were very clear about this: the corporation has a deficit and this will help plug it.

Put another way, the corporation is set to make a profit of, let's say, $14/member/year from the substantial and unpaid efforts of the kingdom chroniclers. For my kingdom that's something over $20K/year. What the chronicler gets out of it is no longer having to arrange printing and mailing -- a win, but I'm not sure it's a $20K/year win.

I'm surprised I haven't seen any commentary about this aspect of the change. The FAQ on this change has a rather disingenuous answer that extols the value of membership while completely ignoring the fact that an associate member gets all those benefits -- so what costs are incurred by a sustaining membership that justify the higher price? Near as I can tell, electronic kingdom newsletters are pure profit and nobody is talking about whether that affects the people currently producing them for free. Does the new arrangement make the job of kingdom chronicler more attractive, or less?

There's a bigger issue I haven't addressed here: why have an online newsletter at all when you can just get the information from the web site? It is possible that the prospect of pointless work will deter more would-be chroniclers than the pricing structure will (though kingdoms are required to find somebody to do this job). Time will tell, I guess. I asked about this at the Pennsic meeting and it sounds like kingdom newsletters will continue to exist for a good long time. It's in the corporation's best interest to make that happen, after all. (That's me talking, not the BoD.)

I don't have a dog in this race, being neither a member of SCA Inc. nor a kingdom chronicler. But having been both in the past, I still care.

Comments

[dr-zrfq.livejournal.com]

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.

[cellio]

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.