A year has passed since The Hudson Independent began operation as a not-for-profit enterprise published by The Hudson Valley News Foundation. As a result, the “Indy” relies on contributions from you, our readers, for the first time since its establishment in 2006. Thank you for making the initial year of this vital transition a success!
Especially important – and gratifying – was your response to a matching grant from a kind and generous individual who insisted on anonymity. You enabled us to achieve the match, which together with your earlier donations, allowed the Indy to surmount various first-year anxieties and challenges.
Like an increasing number of news organizations around the country, mainly small local ones but also larger entities, The Hudson Valley News Foundation became an IRS-certified 501c3 not-for-profit eligible to receive tax-deductible contributions as a result of intensifying financial pressures that have led to the collapse of thousands of newspapers. In our case as well as many others, the economic impact of Covid on advertising exacerbated the threat, so we opted for an economic model combining ad revenues and donations, which in fact proved to be essential over the past year, and will remain so. We determined, too, that The Hudson Independent should focus exclusively on daily delivery of news through its digital platform, rather than returning to its pre-Covid roots as a monthly print publication. Certainly the digital mode is much more cost-effective, but more importantly, it reflects the dominant expectations of readers today.
We hope you will continue to support the commitment to high-quality journalism the Indy has sustained through the existential challenges of recent years. Without you, the success story of our first year could not have been written.
With deep gratitude,
Walter Montgomery
Robert Kimmel
Dean Gallea
Barrett Seaman
Michael B. Richards
Paula Romanow Etzel
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