Maya Schenwar /Photo: Sandy Morris (Sally Blood). Shot on location in Half Sour restaurant’s Speakeasy, halfsourchicago.com. | Cover Design: Dan Streeting
At Newcity we’re in a race to reinvent ourselves. My to-do list each week includes researching and then implementing some major new initiative that in the past might have been done over the course of a year—if at all.
This last Tuesday, for example, we launched a web-based portal to make it simple for businesses and cultural organizations to directly buy advertising in Newcity. While this would be an operational improvement at any time, it’s an imperative now because our core advertisers, cultural entities, are in an existential struggle to survive, and marketing, although vital to that survival, is easier to cut than people. So we need new clients, fast, and we hear that some businesses are even thriving now. (Hello, bike shops.) By combining self-service ad-buying with more expansive email campaigns across industries, we have a higher probability of finding new advertisers who are inclined to market right now. (Or so we hope.)
Other adjustments are, we expect, temporary. With theater and dance the most challenged of all art forms, given their inherently live and public nature, we are combining our coverage into a single “Stage” section until plays and dance performances are once more produced with regularity. Sharon Hoyer, our longtime dance editor, will oversee this combined section, while Kevin Greene shifts his focus to building digital engagement with all of Newcity’s content.
Our commitment to cultural coverage is not wavering, even as the world we cover trembles with chaos. Literary editor Tara Betts assembled her first Lit 50, two months later than our usual issue, as we chased a postponed Printers Row Lit Fest that now will not happen at all. Tara’s been called into action in unexpected ways as well, helping select the poems we’ve published these last couple of months as our editorial plans shifted in response to the insane world of 2020. That’s new for us: twelve original poems published the last two months.
And we continue to transform the distribution of our magazine. Gone are the days when we could produce what we do funded entirely by advertising. Now we’re relying on you, our readers, to buy subscriptions. We’ve made this as easy and as compelling as possible. We hope you’ll visit newcityshop.com and join those in our community who’ve already signed on. Our commitment to you in return is to focus more than ever on expanding the breadth, impact and quality of our writing, art and design in our neverending mission to create a great magazine.
And you can expect continued reinvention, of course. The list grows each week.
BRIAN HIEGGELKE
Look for Newcity’s August 2020 print edition at over 1000 Chicago-area locations this week or subscribe to the print edition at Newcityshop.com.
Editor's Letter: August 2022 The Printers Row Lit Fest is alive and well and living in September. We created the Lit 50, the first of our Leaders of Culture lists, as a way to establish a written manifestation of the community that was starting to form and congregate around the book fair.
