Bay Soundings Looks to the Future:
Confirming Current Subscribers, Reaching out to New Readers

This issue marks the ninth anniversary of Bay Soundings, a milestone that's nearly matched by our growth in circulation over those years.

As we look toward the future in a challenging economic climate, we realized we need to back up and make sure that everyone on our mailing lists still wants to be here. Bay Soundings is printed and mailed as inexpensively as possible so we use bulk rate mailing. The downside of bulk mail is that we aren't automatically notified when someone moves or changes their job address.

We're also finalizing plans for three new initiatives:

• First we'd like to expand print distribution beyond our current locations. Visit our About Us page for a list of current distribution sites, and then let us know if you have any ideas about where we should be delivering bulk copies. The possibilities are endless — auto mechanics, dentists, restaurants, schools or civic organizations. The goal is to find "champions" who make sure Bay Soundings is displayed and let us know when copies are running low.
• To make it easier to share our stories, we're adding Facebook and Twitter buttons to the website as well as posting PDFs that allow you to print stories on standard office paper to share with friends who prefer paper.
• We'll also make our website more interactive and provide more hyperlinks for in-depth information. We're already getting about 200,000 hits per month and several surveys show that many people prefer to receive publications online instead of in the mail. We're still working out the details on exactly how those changes will occur — please let us know what you think.

Over the next six months, we're asking that everyone who receives a print edition of Bay Soundings by mail contact us to confirm that their address is correct and that they would like to continue receiving a mailed copy. To sign up online, visit www.tbrpc.org/baysoundings.