SCA Inc. announced earlier this year that kingdom newsletters will be moving to electronic format next year. (PDF, it was clarified at the Pennsic BoD meet&greet.) People who want paper will still be able to get it; while pricing hadn't been determined as of the Pennsic discussion, the sense I got was that there would be an extra charge for this.

Do you see what they did there?

There are two primary levels of membership, associate ($30) and sustaining ($45). The difference between the two is that with the latter you get your kingdom newsletter. The vast majority of that $15 difference goes to the cost of printing and mailing that newsletter. I edited a kingdom newsletter for four years (about 15-20 years ago, ack, but I've talked with more recent chroniclers and it hasn't changed much) and saw this process up close.

So now, your $45 membership will get you access to online newsletters (all of them, I learned at Pennsic), whose incremental hosting costs are tiny, and if you want paper you'll pay more than that (beyond the sustaining membership). Meanwhile, the kingdom chroniclers who are donating their labor for a break-even proposition now, out of deep caring for their kingdoms and the satisfaction of a job well done, will instead be donating that labor for the corporate bottom line. The directors at Pennsic were very clear about this: the corporation has a deficit and this will help plug it.

Put another way, the corporation is set to make a profit of, let's say, $14/member/year from the substantial and unpaid efforts of the kingdom chroniclers. For my kingdom that's something over $20K/year. What the chronicler gets out of it is no longer having to arrange printing and mailing -- a win, but I'm not sure it's a $20K/year win.

I'm surprised I haven't seen any commentary about this aspect of the change. The FAQ on this change has a rather disingenuous answer that extols the value of membership while completely ignoring the fact that an associate member gets all those benefits -- so what costs are incurred by a sustaining membership that justify the higher price? Near as I can tell, electronic kingdom newsletters are pure profit and nobody is talking about whether that affects the people currently producing them for free. Does the new arrangement make the job of kingdom chronicler more attractive, or less?

There's a bigger issue I haven't addressed here: why have an online newsletter at all when you can just get the information from the web site? It is possible that the prospect of pointless work will deter more would-be chroniclers than the pricing structure will (though kingdoms are required to find somebody to do this job). Time will tell, I guess. I asked about this at the Pennsic meeting and it sounds like kingdom newsletters will continue to exist for a good long time. It's in the corporation's best interest to make that happen, after all. (That's me talking, not the BoD.)

I don't have a dog in this race, being neither a member of SCA Inc. nor a kingdom chronicler. But having been both in the past, I still care.

Somebody asked in the comments how donating labor to produce a newsletter is different from the other labor we donate to run events, organize practices, and so on. This person also pointed out that not everything in the newsletter is on the web site. I replied:

Here's the thing: for an online delivery vehicle, a PDF newsletter is pretty far down on the usability scale. We should put the event announcements, letters from officers, articles, etc. on the web site as first-class items. We already do this for event announcements and some articles. Why create an index of PDF files to find specific content (as the commenter proposed) instead of just indexing the content directly? If I want to find a particular court report or set of meeting minutes, isn't it easier to go to the "court reports" or "minutes" page and choose the event/date from there? (I read the online newsletter when it comes out, at least most of the time, but I never refer to old issues -- in case you were wondering.)

Now since paper newsletters are also being produced, I totally understand why we post a PDF. You have to do the work anyway; why not? But duplicate work is being done and -- demonstrably -- not all of the content is making it to the web site beyond the PDFs. So consider an alternate model: make the web site primary, not secondary, and assemble the paper newsletter from the content on the web site. It could even be (largely) scripted. The chronicler does less work, the chronicler and webmaster do less redundant work, people using the internet get consistent and easy access to information, and people getting paper copies still get them.

By the way, so far as I know baronies are required to have chroniclers, but there is no requirement that chroniclers produce newsletters of any particular quality or frequency.

On labor donation, Alienor (in another comment) has it exactly right in my book: donating labor so that my friends (writ large) can have fun and/or so we can do things that wouldn't happen otherwise is very very different from donating my labor so some third party (which assumes none of the burden) can profit. This is why I will no longer contribute significant work to events that unnecessarily charge the corporate tax; I don't grant the corporation the moral right to demand that money. (I would, however, support a franchise model where local groups choose to purchase services from a national organization, and wouldn't have a problem with those prices building in significant profit.)

Yesterday I wrote about performances and later I'll write about some corporate-level stuff (BoD meet-and-greet, SCA census). And I still have to pull pictures off of the camera. This post is miscellaneous other stuff. Read more…