Important: Get Full, Uninterrupted Access To Our Stories
Dear Reader,
In the coming days, we will be implementing premium access plans – a metered paywall – to allow full access to our stories and help pay for the reporting.
If you are a current paying member, then all you need to do is set up a password. Your membership will continue uninterrupted at the current rate for as long as you renew. Please follow the instructions below. If you are not a current subscriber, then you will need to subscribe for full uninterrupted access here: https://my.bklyner.com
Instructions for Current Paying Subscribers: You should have by now received a welcome email with a link to set your password. If you don’t receive the welcome email, you can use your email to sign in to the site, put any password in, and then you will be prompted to update your password. If you aren’t able to set your password, you can contact us and we will help you reset the password so you can have uninterrupted access.
We realize that not everyone will be a regular reader, and you want to be able to share a story with a friend or relative without making them pay, so we will keep four stories a month free for all who come to our site. After that, you will be asked to subscribe. Your subscription will allow you to log in from up to 5 devices, so only one member of the household needs to subscribe.
Why are we doing this?
We are forever grateful to those of you who have supported us so far, either through subscriptions or through ads, and sometimes both, allowing us to continue to report on Brooklyn communities and issues, but the time has come to grow. We need to hire more reporters to provide the kind of reporting we think will make the most significant difference – in depth, neighborhood level – and we need everyone to pitch in.
There are almost 3 million people in Brooklyn. There are 18 community boards and 16 councilmembers, 23 police precincts, there are rezonings in Bushwick, Gowanus, and Sunset Park, the jail expansion downtown, BQE repairs and truck route revisions, spot-zonings in Crown Heights, school integration efforts across the borough, retail concerns and lots of housing and development issues across the neighborhoods. That’s not even touching on subjects like safe streets, playgrounds or air quality. In 2021, 12 of the 16 council members will be term-limited out – we want to be in a position to cover these races when everyone else will be focused on who the next mayor will be.
Your concerns that we don’t cover everything the same are fair – but to cover these issues well and consistently, we need more reporters. To hire more reporters, we need more money, and our only sources of cash, unlike for legacy papers, are subscriptions from readers and ads from local businesses and institutions.
We thought a lot about a fair price to charge for our work – we want to make it possible for a broad audience to access the information. A basic cup of coffee these days is just around $2.00. A slice of pizza is rarely under $2.75. The subway is $3.00 a ride. We are pricing access right in line with these necessities. We get it, it is not cheap to live in the city, but we are hopeful that if you care about your neighborhood, you will find a way to round up the change and become a subscriber that pays us to keep an eye on the elected officials and meetings where decisions about your tax dollars are made.
Thank you for reading, thank you for subscribing, and we look forward to being able to hire more reporters to bring you more news you care about in the neighborhoods you reside.
Liena Zagare
Editor & Publisher