Just a small taste of Cookie Wars 2014. The beanie was sewn for me by baseball mom Joan Payne.
Special delivery. (Shelli Trumbull photo)
Have an extra buck or two and not sure what to do with it?
With one swipe of a credit card, you (yes, you!) can help keep the dream alive.
The dream of independent journalism not being snuffed out by a monolithic corporation. The dream of every kid on Central Whidbey getting every one of their athletic accomplishments, be it a first or a 71st-place performance, noticed.
The dream of getting me out of the dish pits.
In just under 21 months, Coupeville Sports (a one-man operation run out of a top-secret bunker next to Penn Cove on a computer powered by a squirrel on a treadmill) has published 2,006 articles.
That’s a real number.
A number that makes the output of the “professional” papers look like diddly and squat. And I’m doing it in my spare time, working around a real job to pay my minimal bills.
Varsity high school sports. JV. Middle school. Youth sports. Community sports. You name it, I cover it.
The Canadian-owned “local” newspapers do not, can not and will not do what I am doing.
For one thing, they have a problem with my over-use of exclamation points…
Suck it, back bacon lovers!!
But, I could do more. Freed from the constraints of answering to The Man, I could be at EVERY home high school game, and not just some.
I could show up in person for more community sports activities. Hunt down more scoops.
Expand into South Whidbey coverage, even. Recent articles on Falcon athletes Ricky Muzzy and Isla Dubendorf got nice numbers.
The sound you just heard was the South Whidbey Record trying to wake up from its 12-year coma/nap, and failing…
But to do it, I need your help.
Many have donated to the cause so far (check out our David’s Best Ever Friends page), but now it’s a billion, trillion times easier, with the addition of a donation button to the blog.
Live in Jersey? Bangladesh? Want to help fight the invaders from Moose Jaw? Keep alive that one irrational voice in the woods, screaming the gossip in all caps?
You can do so now, much, much easier. If you feel like it.
Either way, I will keep trying to navigate that tightrope.
On the one hand, I am fond of flippin’ the bird at Black Press/Sound Publishing, as it tries to buy up every paper in the free world, before demanding you pay for the privilege of reading stories that run five days late (how very 1945 of them…).
On the other hand, Coupeville Sports is a celebration, and we have to keep the funk goin’ down.
The recent explosion of Cookie Wars, in which local moms and CHS athletes went on a rampage of bringing me sweet treats, was a grass roots example of how this can work.
I’m not looking for a Hawaiian vacation. My crud-encrusted car, “White Thunder,” is just fine for the one-mile trip from my duplex down to the sports fields at CHS.
But I would like to stop crushing my fingers in the dish pits and devote my entire time to doing what I do best, while I can still get those middle fingers extended Canada way at the Evil Empire that erased three years worth of my bylined stories and couldn’t give a crap.
So, think about it.
Your 45 cents (or more … you can certainly donate more … maybe make it an even two quarters, at least) keeps the Lone Wolf howlin’.
Coupeville Sports 