You did it! We did it! Everyone did it! 10,000 subscriptions!
I can’t tell you how encouraging the past month has been for the New Zealand Geographic team. To make a simple call for help, and to receive the flood of support from readers willing to stake us with their hard-earned cash is really humbling. We know it’s hard out there, and for you to respond as you have demonstrates was NZGeo means to you, and what you feel it means for New Zealand at large.
A jet of energy has ripped through the team, our writers, photographers, designers, editors, subscriptions, digital people, sales-and-marketing-sort-of-folks. Rather than looking at 2025 like the approach of a long cold winter, we’re actually looking forward to it and the stories we can tell on your behalf.
It has also been instructive. The squillions of comments we received as part of our readers’ survey sits in a pile of tatty and heavily be-highlighted papers on the editor’s desk for us to continue trawling through—for encouragement, for fair-minded criticism, for new ideas and passing thoughts. We will be surveying you again next year.
A casual observer could make an assumption that this campaign has started something else too. Ten days ago our colleagues at The Spinoff launched a remarkably similar campaign, though in the awful shade of being forced to let four staff go and discontinue a number of regular columns and newsletters. They deserve help too.
Our goal of 10,000 subscriptions was a nice round number, but it wasn’t entirely arbitrary. It was the figure I estimated would keep our journalism work in the black through 2025. We can’t anticipate what next year will bring, but with 7900 subscriptions we were badly exposed. You have changed that, and given us a far more stable foundation.
Thank you for caring, and for joining thousands of other readers who decided to support us. It’s kind of remarkable. We’re in your debt and will re-pay you one beautiful story at a time.
James, Davina, Catherine, Ben, Rebekah, Jeremy, Jervis, Kate, Arie, Richie, Lewis, Marc, Mary, Rosie, Lottie and scores of writers and photographers…
