Well folks, it’s that time of year again. Sure as snow was some twenty years ago prior to the long-wrought effects of anthropogenic climate change, December comes back around, bringing with it seasonal depression, reflections on the state of things, and portents of those to come.

December means many things to many people. If you’re me, for instance, aside from deadlines, December means day drinking for most of the period between December 24th and January 1st, and watching lots of fucked-up movies with my dad.

December is a time of holidays, of time off (for those of us not entirely absorbed in our jobs). 

Coincidental with all of this is of course the matter of giving.

As we plunge ever deeper into the days of mid-afternoon nights culture conspires to manufacture generosity.

Whether for reasons to do with a certain Christian holiday (be it secularized or otherwise), December is “the season of giving,” immediately preceded by huge sales and chararcterized by the exchange of commodity goods and what can only be described as “White people food.”

That said, Black Friday sales and gift exchanges are of course false flags for something more sinister, that being spending money.

If you are at all like me, spending money occupies no small part of your day-to-day life. Getting groceries? That’s a hundred bucks. Lunch with friends? Twenty bucks. Parking on campus? Five bucks. Rent, internet, utilities?

Well, you get my point.

It so happens that this month I’ve had the misfortune of having to drop a truly staggering (and somewhat unexpected) amount of both mine and Arthur’s money.

At the beginning of this month, my phone gave up the ghost, forcing my hand in a months-long war of attrition between my desire to effectively disconnect and replace it with a hyper-minimalist flip phone; and my eventual recognition that my job, my bank, and Trent’s stunningly bad multi-factor authentication all make it impossible for me to do that.

Having accepted this burden, I was forced to shell out a cool $500 CAD for a Google Pixel 7A, which I hate, but will hopefully not start trying to actively self-immolate after two years of ownership as with my last phone (a Samsung A53).

Meanwhile in Arthurland, this month saw my co-editor and I having to run an extra-large payroll on account of the overtime from budget week, renew our Errors and Omissions insurance policy, and buy tickets to the Canadian University Press’ annual student journalism conference. 

On the day I’m writing this we’ve just paid three very talented local bands for playing a charity gig for us last night.

This has turned me into a kind of person I hate: a person who is obsessed with money.

Being embarrassingly and transparently honest, this show was eating me up inside. For the past two weeks I’ve been living in a constant state of anxiety and listening to “Money for Nothing” by Dire Straights more times than is normal or healthy for any marginally sane person.

In the defense of recent developments, this has at least partially been the case since I took over a significant portion of Arthur’s financial management. While my co-editor brings home the proverbial bacon through voraciously selling ads and soliciting donations, it seemingly falls to me to find ways to piss it all away.

Arguably my fiscally conservative inclinations predate even this, going back to the moment of my signing a lease for my own place, which—no joke—cost triple the price of my part of the house I shared with four people.

However for better, if largely to the detriment of my own mental health, it is this volume of Arthur which has tuned me in to the world of finance. It’s this volume which has had be worries about remittances, and payroll taxes, and deductibles, and turnover, and the CRA Grants and Contributions Online Services portal.

Hell, it’s this volume of Arthur that got me a job interview at the Globe & Mail—you don’t get more fiscal or conservative than that!

And while we now have someone—a very talented and responsible someone, at that—to supervise myself and Abbigale lest we try and embezzle Arthur’s annual income in a fit of mania and take flight to Montevideo, at least some of this (specifically the bit I like least) is still kind of my responsibility.

As you’ll know from having written a bit of our newspaper, Arthur is an independently incorporated not-for-profit organization; a company without share capital. You know this, presumably, because we don’t shut the fuck up about it.

We’re funded in large part by the generosity (willful or otherwise) of Trent University students, who pay us a yearly levy of just shy of $15 each, or $7-and-a-bit per semester. This puts Arthur in a better position than a lot of similar outlets, all told, because we have a pretty consistent projection of revenue year-over-year.

While other newspapers and independent publishers either have to find ways to make money off of subscriptions, or else commit to huge donation drives, barring another turn in student politics toward the petty and conservative, we can reliably assume that we’re not going to have to turn to Lotto Max just to continue existing.

However, the thing about running a non-profit is that it’s generally frowned upon to make money, or at least to make too much money. Instead, wherever possible, you try to zero that end-year line and put whatever you did make in profit somewhere for safekeeping. 

That’s exactly what we did over the course of the pandemic, squirreling away a $50-some-thousand-dollar nest-egg. 

Now that may sound like a lot of money, but were we to lose all our funding next year (hypothetically—please do not take this as an invitation or idea) $50,000 would only be a fraction of what’s needed to sustain us.

The common wisdom here is that one’s figurative mattress cash should total one-year’s operating costs, a number at least three times the current amount in our nest egg that will take several more years than that to amass, even forecasting consistent and generous surpluses.

Even that’s being optimistic, though—while we’ve been lucky enough to receive a levy increase in recent memory, and our levy fee has been routinely indexed to the Consumer Price Index (CPI), rising inflation equally means rising costs in just about every aspect of our operations.

Shit’s more expensive! What else can we say?

Not only is rent, our website, our print costs more expensive, but like many people we’re being fucked by predatory corporations like Adobe who continue to jack prices while making their products worse.

Further, as tuition, groceries, and the general cost of living balloons, we’ve been doing our best to pay people equitably in the face of this increasingly worker-hostile world.

Arthur pays 12 staff members at or above Ontario living wage on a budget a fraction that of many other businesses. It’s no mean feat, and we’re very proud of that fact, but it also presents us with no shortage of difficulties.

That’s why, for the last and most concerted time in the year 2024, we are asking you for money.

If you’ve learned anything about my character through the body of my written output you’ll understand that I despise the prospect of this. Asking for money is about as fun as fellating a gun, to me. 

Actually, perhaps fellating a gun sounds more fun in some perverse way.

Yet it is true what they say about money making the world go around. No matter how much of it you have, truly there can never be enough, and though we want to make the world change, we nonetheless find ourselves hard pressed not to think about the price tag.

That’s the thing they don’t tell you in school, after all. You can well drop out of math in Grade 11 (much like me, admittedly), but sooner or later math is going to come for you. 

We live in a world of markets. To some degree a defining characteristic of modernity is the ability to flatten anything into a dollar value. To that end, whether or not you want to admit it, journalism is ultimately a numbers game.

With that in mind, I want to break down some of the numbers at Arthur and how they stack up relative to a couple points of noteworthy comparison in the Trent community. Having done that I want to articulate a value proposition, and—regardless of whether or not you’re flat broke or a gorillionaire—present a way that you (yes, you!) can help.

This year we have an estimated income of about $170,000. I’m fudging the numbers to avoid having to remember a bunch of ones, tens, and decimal places, but know that the first two numbers and the number of digits are generally correct.

You might observe that $170,000 is a lot of money. You’d be right.

Indeed, it’s more money than I alone have ever possessed at any point in my life, or as it stands seem poised ever to. Yet split that 12 ways and you begin to see the problem. 

For one person $170,000 is a windfall. For a company, well…

For point of comparison I find it illustrative to turn to the Ontario Sunshine List. I have the entire list downloaded on the Arthur office iMac because I am one sick fuck, and even a cursory glance reveals some really interesting facts aabout the ways in which the money of the Ontario taxpaying public (and the students of Trent University!) is distributed.

For instance, last year former President the-one-and-only Leo Groarke made $337,356, or for those keeping score about double what Arthur made and used to pay three editors and ten staff writers.

Even with our relative pittance, we managed to post a few bangers that made him really mad, so I think we have to call that a win for the little guy.

More than 100 people at Trent University make more money than what Arthur operates on in one entire publishing year, so really, by giving even a little in a way you’re sticking it to The Man.

This coming year we’re making a lot of big changes (and hopefully, improvements!), but like most things, those come attached with a price tag.

For example: you may have noticed that our website is beginning to show its age. Links are beginning to rot, things aren’t embedding the way that they should, and the goddamn search bar doesnt show up on our mobile site.

This is, it goes without saying, a massive pain in the ass. We inherited this website, and though it is very pretty, years of adding content without doing commensurate maintenance have left it buggy and inaccessible. Not to mention it completely shits the bed once every two weeks and we almost hit our bandwidth cap every month.

It’s time for a change, a change to the tune of…well, it’s a lot more than we’re paying now.

Of course, there’s a reason for that. Not only will a new site make our lives much, much easier (we hope), it will also let you (yes, YOU!) do such things as: search properly, make an Arthur account, leave us comments, and TOGGLE BETWEEN LIGHT AND DARK MODE. 

We told you this was a gamechanger.

Alongside that revamp we also want to replace our logo so that instead of our present Frankenstein’s masthead we might have one that appears to possess both cohesiveness and intention.

As part of this process, we want to make an effort to recruit and maintain more recurring donors. Despite being funded by a student levy, Arthur serves a broad community; if you’re reading this, there’s a good chance that you aren’t even a Trent student.

While we have a couple donors who give us money monthly and yearly (to whom we’re extremely grateful), the vast majority of our community readership doesn’t. And while even a yearly donation equal to our levy ($14.30) is a relatively modest ask for most people, if even half of our community readership gave that much it would completely change the scope of our budget.

Our hope is that the more we bring our readers into the fold, the more we help you see the value in the things we do, the more likely we will be able to convince you to part with $5, $10, $20 a year (or better yet, a month!).

There’s no carrot–stick dilemna here. We’re neither going to tell you that we’re going to start charging subscriptions, nor are we going to start offering “premium” tiered content to paying subscribers.

It is Arthur’s mandate to remain free and open-access, now and forever, and so long as we retain any amount of sway I can speak for myself and my co-editor when I say that will never, ever change.

As for the Patreon model, that too seems rather antithetical to Arthur’s guiding principles. As a paper who pride ourselves on being on the front lines of the Class War, creating any implicit class hierarchy sounds like bourgeois decadence.

Plus, we’re already working 24/7 (or so it feels), and trying to eke out another thousand words of “content” every month sounds 1) hellish, and 2) like it would detract from the quality of the content we already produce.

Rather, Arthur’s value proposition resides in the stuff we already produce—the stuff you can read (for FREE!) at WWW.TRENTARTHUR.CA. We’d like to hope that it speaks for itself, though if it doesn’t, we’d like to think the fact that it wins awards sure does!

However, our written content is only the start.

Think of it this way. Our value proposition is that, at our current level of financing, we can do roughly whatever it is we do now. With more money, therefore, we can pay more people, cover more expenses, buy more equipment, just generally do MORE.

There’s some of this more which we already want/are planning to do. Our weekly radio show, beloved by a select handful of our favourite freaks, was a MORE item when I first pitched it to my colleagues more than a year ago. Now it's a staple (and one we regularly get compliments on, at that!).

This year, we’re trying to do MORE even than that MORE. We’re talking long-form video interviews, Twitch.tv livestreams, ACTUALLY USING OUR TIKTOK. We’re going where the kids are at, baby, but we need money to do it.

The basic calculus is this: to do more you either need more people working for you, or the same number of people working more.

Either way costs more money. 

There’s ways to subsidize this, sure, but those only go so far. For the past several years we’ve only received one 8-week Canada Summer Jobs position, as the government is seemingly trying to claw back all of the public spending to which it committed during the pandemic.

Meanwhile, Trent’s TWSP and TSWEP subsidies have remained stagnant for years at a pittance of only 70% of wage coverage up to $2000, and even still groups have been getting fewer of those subsidized positions year-over-year.

To put it in perspective, we pay staff writers $20.60, for 8 hours a week of work, 24 weeks of the school year. For just over $4,100, then, you can finance one whole staff writer position, including employment insurance and payroll taxes.

So in that spirit, I guess this last call goes out to the big spenders. If you read the above paragraph and thought “Hey! I’ve got $4000 lying around,” boy do I have some propositions for you!

If you’ve got, say, $10,000 close to hand, that would pretty much cover either our entire print costs for the publishing year, OR a whole year of our various web publishing expenses. Not a bad bargain, and we’d be more than happy to prominently display your name somewhere in said print issue/website if that’s of interest to you. We could even send you a postcard.

This might be, for instance, a good way to assuage any guilt you feel about being on the Sunshine List—especially if you find yourself inclined to frequently on things you think Arthur should be doing without doing anything besides to give us the means to do it.

We can’t promise any Trent University/City of Peterborough staff that giving us—oh, let’s say $25,000? will stop us from writing any kind of critical coverage of them…no, that’s it actually. We can’t promise you anything. 

We would appreciate the money though.

Lastly, for anyone donating an amount of money in excess of $50,000, we have an extra special offer for you. We would be more than happy to provide you with a t-shirt that says something crass like “I GAVE ARTHUR [INSERT AMOUNT HERE] AND ALL I GOT WAS CALLED A HOMOPHOBIC SLUR.”

We’d also be happy to shake your hand, though ours are often clammy and cold.

As I write these final words, I sit in the Arthur office listening to “If I Had $1,000,000” by the Barenaked Ladies, daydreaming about what exactly I would do if I, or Arthur, had $1,000,000. I’d tell you outright, but I’m afraid I can’t put it in print (it’s obscene).

There is, of course, one way you can find out, though that I will have to leave in your capable hands, dear reader.

Happy Festivus; see you freaks next year.