A welcome letter from Michael Kusek, publisher of Take Magazine.
Welcome to Take Magazine’s new home on the web.
Maybe you’re new to us. Perhaps you’ve been a reader since last year when we first launched. Either way, I’d like to welcome you and hope that you’ll be back many times in the future to find out the best of what is happening in the cultural communities of New England.
The news coming out of Take over the last few weeks has been pretty bad. Just a few short weeks ago, I had to make the decision to stop publishing our print edition. It wasn’t from lack of subscribers, or newsstand sales, or lack of interested advertisers – or even that printing on actual paper is passé or too expensive. We had to end the print edition because I was never able to pull together enough capital to keep the magazine going while we built up our advertising.
We managed to get very, very close to raising the money we needed from some generous and very supportive lenders – but what we did raise ultimately wasn’t enough. As we were about to go into the design of our August/September issue, I woke up one morning and finally decided it was time to pull the plug. The more I looked at our perpetually empty bank account and countless spreadsheets detailing mounting debt, the answer was pretty plain. Our only shot to stay in business – and to pay the many people that we owe money to – was to further trim our sails and go digital only.
As I’ve previously stated in posts on Facebook, my commitment is to getting our financial house in order as quickly as possible. I have many obligations to fulfill to the lenders who have supported the magazine, the freelancers who we have a commitment to pay for their work and to the readers who purchased subscriptions from us.
There is much positive news to share that will help us meet those obligations. Thanks to the commitment of an amazing couple, they recognized our need for a new website that can grow to help us meet our goals and responded by helping us finance it. Many nonprofit partners and advertisers have reached out to us and said that they will continue to work with us going forward. Readers messaged us to say they would do exactly what we wanted to hear – they will keep reading. All those of us working at Take remain committed to publishing good, useful, fun and unique stories about the cultural lives of New Englanders.
Over the next few weeks you’ll be able to come to this site and find a mix of new stories as well as articles that we previously published only in print. We’ll also be highlighting hand-picked events from all over New England that we think you should get out of your house and go to. Have a good poke around – there is a bunch of new stuff here on the site right now.
Don’t miss any of it as it is published. Please be sure to follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and also sign up to get our twice weekly emails (over there to the right – you can sign up immediately!).
As it has been since day one, if you think there is something we should be covering, please drop us a line and let us know at info@takeindustries.com.
Many thanks,
Michael Kusek, publisher
