From the Editor’s Desk

Ted Olinger, Executive Editor

The Voice of the Key Peninsula

The Key Peninsula News has been published more or less continuously by the KP Civic Center Association for 43 years. By now, even occasional readers will have seen our new look and new content, but this is not a new approach. It is an evolution of the foundation built by volunteers and their editors who labored over decades to create and refine what has become our community’s newspaper of record.

We call ourselves the voice of the Key Peninsula, but that is only true when your voice comes through in the stories we publish, the images we print, and the columns and letters you write.

In just the past year, we have covered forest management and teen suicide, property rights and school funding, national trends in cybercrime and the local bake sales put together by neighbors to help our own.

We have also just launched a vastly improved website made possible by grants from The Angel Guild and other donors. Every article and image published by the KP News since 2003 will be available in our online archive; we have 1,000 posted already. We are still working to collect and post digitized versions of all the hardcopy editions we can find, all the way back to the original KP Newsletter (we’re up to November 1982 so far).

The new website also includes an interactive calendar of community events posted and updated by the event organizers with their latest information. It is a central clearinghouse of public services, fundraisers and activities for the KP that is not available anywhere else. (And we will continue to print that calendar in each edition too.)

We deliver 9,000 copies of the KP News to every address on the KP every month and to subscribers and local businesses where visitors and summer residents can pick it up—all for free—as part of our parent organization’s mission “to foster and promote the civic, social, cultural and general well-being of the Key Peninsula community.”

Our volunteer staff is larger now than at any time in the paper’s history, even as the paid staff has been reduced; we have 14 regular contributors, 20 active guest columnists and almost a dozen others working behind the scenes providing distribution and oversight.

With this foundation in place, I am finishing my role as executive editor. Volunteer staff will take a larger role in creating the paper and a new editor will manage their work in the coming months. I will be returning to other professional commitments long neglected, but will continue to support the KP News in any way I can as we work to live up to our motto and our goal every month: to be the voice of the Key Peninsula.

I ask you to join us in that work.

In the pages of our September edition, you will find the familiar green envelope that appears annually to ask for a donation, gift subscription or renewal. (You can also donate through our website.)

The KP News exists under the 501(c)(3) umbrella of the KP Civic Center, but operates independently when it comes to content and money. We earn 85 percent of our $100,000 plus annual budget from advertising and subscription income. The rest comes from you.

The financial support of our donors is what has allowed us to reorganize, streamline and create a new look, new website and broader approach as we report more stories in more detail. Our writers know what to seek out. Our photographers know what to look for. The community knows they can trust us to get it right, to inform them and to support them.

That is what it means to be the voice of the Key Peninsula.

Be a part of it.

Thank you.