Week of Oct. 10, 2024

From the editor’s desk

The RN&R is hosting a party this evening to celebrate all of the people and businesses our readers voted for in the Best of Northern Nevada poll. I wish we could invite the entire community, especially since this is the first Best Of party since the pre-pandemic days of 2019. But, well, it takes time and resources to throw an event—even a highly DIY one like the one we’ve planned for tonight—and those are both pretty scarce, so we were obliged to keep it on the smaller side. 

Pre-pandemic, we usually had eight or 10 people on staff, split about evenly between the editorial department and the business and ad sales department. The wonderful ad sales people used to do the party planning.

Now, we have a staff of one and a half. I’m the only full-time editorial employee, and Publisher Jimmy Boegle—in an intense balancing act not for the faint of heart—runs the business department, oversees publishing duties, and runs an entire other newspaper, the Coachella Valley Independent. 

Hosting parties is only one of many things I wish the RN&R could do on a larger scale again. This business was never easy, but the stakes have changed drastically over the last five years. It’s harder than ever to sustain a publication on ad revenue. Thousands of local newspapers in the U.S. have closed. We work on a fraction of the resources we used to. It is, to say the least, perpetually stressful.

So, why do we still do it? We still care about our community and the people who live in it. We still want to offer a platform for Northern Nevadans to keep in touch with and learn from each other. And in an era when misinformation and lies are running rampant in the political discourse—no, Donald Trump, the 2020 election was not “stolen;” no, Marjorie Taylor Greene, the government cannot summon hurricanes—we know that verified, published facts are one of the most important tools we have to fend off corrupt governments and keep communities intact.

Tonight, it’ll be our honor to raise a glass to the local culture makers and business owners who care about these things, too.

Take care,

—Kris Vagner, managing editor