A Contributor vendor in 2013
Nashville's long-running street publication The Contributor, which nearly shut down in 2013 and has faced financial struggles ever since, is laying off its full-time staff members and abandoning the magazine format it adopted less than a year ago. There are, however, plans to keep the publication alive by transitioning it back to its traditional newspaper model.
Copies of the publication, which was founded in 2007, are sold by people who are currently or have been homeless. Editor Holly McCall, who is being let go along with three staffers, said staff members are getting two weeks' severance.
“The Contributor switched to the magazine model last year because the newspaper had become financially unsustainable," McCall tells the Scene. "We had seven months to try the magazine format, and that was a tough transition for vendors. I think it was frankly a tough transition for some customers who didn’t understand why they were paying $5. I believe with more time we could have been successful, but we sort of ran out of money before we had enough time to adequately test the product.”
“The short story is we ran out of money,” she adds.
McCall says that longtime Contributor volunteer Cathy Jennings is planning to keep the publication alive by taking it over and moving back to the cheaper newspaper model. Jennings has not yet returned the Scene's calls for comment.
“This is a close of one chapter of The Contributor, and it’s sad because I thought the magazine was a good product, and I did think that the increased price would give the vendors an opportunity to make more money," McCall says. "But I guess the upside is we have somebody who has been a committed volunteer for years who wants to keep it going and really wants to serve the vendors, and honestly that’s the bottom line."
