Wednesday, January 7, 2015

Monthly Shared Offering: The Public i

January’s Shared Offering will help support The Public i, the longest-lived alternative paper in Champaign-Urbana (C/U). Affiliated with the Independent Media Center for all of its 12 years, the Public i is a 501(c)(3) non-profit. We are all volunteers to “a collectively-run, community-oriented publication,” and invite anyone from the community who wants to attend editorial committee meetings and contribute a story. Providing a forum “for topics underreported and voices underrepresented,” we are local authors writing about local, national, and international issues, plus people originally from C/U who continue to contribute or let us reprint their stuff (Mark Weisbrot, Robert Naiman, Dave Roediger, Sarah Lazare). Every article promotes social justice by valuing diversity, fighting injustice, and promoting equality. Pieces range from “A Day at Stateville,” performed at UU church last May, and Pete Seeger's 1958 visit to UIUC, to the Northwestern Football Player Union, to Russia, Ukraine, and Hungary, and from local healthcare and local prison and police reform (not building a new jail, returning the MRAP, not employing tasers) to the environment and environmental justice (Mahomet aquifer, Homer Bulldog mine). For these and other stories, visit our website at http://publici.ucimc.org/.

We operate on a shoestring budget. In addition to an online edition, we publish an eight page print edition that works out to 10 issues/year. We distribute our ca. 3000 print run in numerous cubbies located throughout C/U. The poor quality, old-timey newsprint vs the better-looking online version means you have to wash the ink off your hands when you're done reading.

Money from UUCUC Shared Offering will go entirely towards publication costs, approximately $300/issue. The Public i does not run ads and all labor (editing, distributing) is volunteer-donated.

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