CounterPunch Business Staff, From Left to Right: Nichole Stephens, Becky Grant, Deva Wheeler.
Dear Readers and Supports,
As you’ve likely seen on our homepage, in our magazine and in our weekly news updates, CounterPunch is 25 this year. Keeping a tiny non-profit alive and kicking for 25 years is no small feat and we are indeed grateful to all of you who value CounterPunch enough to keep it going. Some of our charter members will remember CounterPunch’s humble beginning as a six page, photocopied newsletter. In 2012, we released our current magazine format, now 6 times larger than our original newsletter, but still virtually ad free. When most of us still didn’t use computers for reading news, Jeffrey St. Clair boldly dove headfirst into the world of website building. This was a nightmarish task in mid-90s, when dial-up internet was slow, and it would take hours just to upload the articles. Now, in the amount of time he spent painstakingly posted a half dozen articles, he and Managing Editor Joshua easily post 2-3 times that a day, each weekend.
I started working for Alexander Cockburn 21 years ago. I was hired to convert his hunt-and-pecked type-written articles into a digital format. It was a complicated exchange involving a range of technologies, as archaic as a fountain pen, lots of whiteout and typing paper and a vintage Mac – a suit-cased sized beast that could send emails and upload to servers. Occasionally, the articles were for CounterPunch, so when he…