LETTER TO THE EDITOR (02/27/00)

LETTER TO THE EDITOR

About The Weekly's financial problems

Dear Editor:

You eloquently described the financial problems of The Ukrainian Weekly in your editorial of October 3, 1999, and provided "the complex answer" in your editorial of October 10, 1999. Since then a number of letters to the editor have appeared that indicate The Weekly's importance and the need to support the publication.

For example, Ihor Gawdiak wrote in the November 28 issue that The Weekly plays an extremely important role in providing information about current developments in Ukraine to the segment of the U.S. population that has the greatest effect on formulating policy towards Ukraine. This presumably refers to the members of Congress to whom The Weekly is being sent at a cost of approximately $27,000. If Mr. Gawdiak, who is identified as president of the Ukrainian American Coordinating Council, considers this to be extremely important, why doesn't the UACC assume this cost of $27,000?

Then, you have readers, such as Boris Danik (December 5) and Ihor Lysyj (December 19) who compare The Weekly to newsmagazines such as Newsweek and Time and particularly Mr. Danik recommends that you raise the price of The Weekly to the same level, i.e. $2.50 per copy. My subscription to Time costs me 99 cents (Canadian) per issue or $51.48 per year, whereas The Weekly costs me $50 (U.S.) per year or $75 (Canadian), which is almost 50 percent more than Time. As stated in your editorial of October 3, 1999, The Weekly lost a third of its subscribers when it doubled its subscription price in 1995, and I have no doubt that you would lose another third if you substantially raised the price again.

The point is that for your average reader, The Ukrainian Weekly is much less relevant today than it was even five years ago. Today, the Internet has taken over as the basic source of information and if I wish to have current news about Ukraine, there is an abundant choice of it online. With a click of the mouse, I can read the Kyiv Post, Ukraine Today, Ukraine Online, the English Digest of Den (Day), and for those who read Ukrainian, there are many other online sources such as Vechirnii Kyiv, Ukraina Moloda, Halytski Kontrakty, etc. Moreover, there are Ukrainian newsgroups, mailing lists, chat groups and general websites, such as Brama, InfoUkes, Ukemonde and so on, where one can get all the information about Ukraine one wants, and much more.

The Ukrainian Weekly is still interesting, but mostly due to the insightful, in-depth reports of Roman Woronowycz and other members of your staff, as well as various analyses, commentaries and news about American and Canadian diaspora and the like.

I think that the low number of your Canadian subscribers is probably due to the fact that we receive The Weekly with considerable delay (often two or three weeks after publication) and by then most of the news reported therein becomes very old news indeed. Also, there are competing Canadian papers, such as the bilingual Ukrainian News, published in Edmonton, and Ukrainian-language newspapers such as Homin Ukrainy, published in Toronto. These are probably of greater interest to Canadian Ukrainians since they provide more information about events in Canada, in addition to the usual news about Ukraine. Moreover, the weak Canadian dollar doesn't help The Ukrainian Weekly either.

So, what should The Ukrainian Weekly do in order to survive and prosper? As Mr. Gawdiak stated, The Weekly is "an extremely important" Ukrainian American community newspaper and its importance lies much more in the information it provides to non-Ukrainian Americans, such as the members of Congress, libraries, etc., rather than to your average Ukrainian American or Ukrainian Canadian reader, who can readily find a lot of the same information about Ukraine elsewhere, particularly on the Internet.

It is, therefore, organizations such as Mr. Gawdiak's UACC, and particularly the Ukrainian World Congress, which claims to represent 20 million people of the Ukrainian diaspora, that should financially support The Weekly, with no strings attached. It is they that will be the big losers if The Weekly folds. I suggest that The Weekly should approach every major Ukrainian organization in the United States and Canada with a request of assistance, for the reasons outlined above. It is unfair to have only the Ukrainian National Association supporting the publication of The Weekly.

The other major financing of The Weekly should come from expanded advertising. Today, it is e-commerce that leads the way to business development, sales of goods and services and so on. Advertising one's website in a newspaper has become a common thing to do.

The Weekly should expend much greater effort to attract advertising not only from the Ukrainian community, but also from mainstream American business. I noticed that you have started to do this with ads such as the one from Western Union. You should try to attract many more such ads. Procuring large advertising revenues is almost an art, and you should find and hire such an "artist" as quickly as possible. In fact, many community newspapers live exclusively from advertising, while distributing their papers free of charge. Of course, this is not an option for The Weekly, since it must be mailed to its subscribers, but raising your subscription price would, in my view, be a big mistake. You should consider lowering it to get more subscribers and thereby attract more advertisers.

Finally, The Ukrainian Weekly Press Fund may be a good stop-gap measure, but in the long run it will not work. Apart from charitable organizations, I know of no business that could be sustained from a long period on charity. Let's face it, publication of The Ukrainian Weekly is a business and its press fund is a charity. It would be far preferable for you to find sufficient revenues from Ukrainian organizations that benefit most from The Ukrainian Weekly's existence and from advertising, as outlined above, rather than from charitable donations. (In this regard, by separate mail, I am sending to you an ad of my own.)

Best wishes of success in the new millennium.

George Prima
Pierrefonds, Quebec

Editor's note: We thank Mr. Primak for his comments, some of which, we hope, are taken to heart by our Ukrainian community and its organizations.

However, we differ with the letter writer on the importance of The Ukrainian Weekly Press Fund, which is a significant source of support from readers who value this newspaper.

Also, we ask readers to consider well other providers of information about current events in Ukraine. Yes, there are many sources - many of them new. But there are important questions that need to be considered before readers can come to rely on them as providers of accurate and meaningful information. Are they trustworthy? What are their sources, who are their correspondents? Do they have responsible journalists/editors? Do they verify the information they disseminate? For whom is the information prepared? How is the information presented?

We at The Weekly have a track record of providing reliable and meaningful information, written expressly for our readership outside of Ukraine, as well as an editorial staff that has both training and experience. Thus, we would argue with Mr. Primak that not all things are equal and not all sources of news can be accepted at face value. Finally, not everything packaged online as "information" qualifies as such.

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