Ink Up The Press! Help Revive The N.H. Advocate!

Hi there,

My name is Colleen Van Tassell (CVT) and I'm fundraising to bring back at least one issue of a new, free, all-volunteer version of New Haven's former alt-weekly, the New Haven Advocate. This will be a print-only newspaper with no online presence. You gotta pick it up.

Since this is an all-volunteer project, the new Advocate can't be published weekly, but I do hope to publish quarterly. We'll publish as many issues as we can afford. We will offer sponsorships and advertisements (remember the old Dava, Cutlers, and Bohemia ads?) so if you have a local business, please consider us. Our rates will be affordable.

We have lots of columns and stories lined up. Free obituaries is a public service and we'll write them differently - if your Aunt Irene had a favorite soup recipe we'll print it. We'll feature local music. Not just favored bands of the old days - we want to include all sorts of music be it choirs, organists, buskers, opera singers, or nursing home bands. Artists, photographs, comics, Connecticut history, social commentary, health, shopping, and local events will fill up the middle. We'll have a cemetery columnist digging up stories about residents of tiny graveyards. A pizza columnist will cover pie beyond the triumvirate.

Letters to the editor must be mailed. No hiding behind a keyboard - you must sign it, seal it, and put a stamp on it.

Some of my favorite editors are pitching in to dot the "t"s and cross the "i"s. I was only as good as my editors.

I do hope to craft a version of the old listings which, again, because of limited staff, we'll need to be creative in how to present them.

Some issues will have a surprise in the center. The first 1,000 copies of Issue One will feature a flexi-disc of one of New Haven's favorite bands. We hope to include a zine in some of the remaining issues if we can afford it.

Staying in our lane is important to me; I can't do what the Independent does. Or the Register. They have full-time staffers. This will be the garage rock of local newspapers.

I hope this to be a mix of the Farmer's Almanac, the Pennysaver, Flair magazine, the Village Voice (circa 1977), Creem, Italian Vogue and a telephone pole flyer.

Here's where you come in: Printing costs are the only hurdle from launching. Money raised will help pay the printer - at present we plan on using Trumbull Printing. It'll also help pay for a sample sheet for advertising rates. The more we raise the more issues we can print. We will deliver them ourselves to businesses and sprinkle some honor boxes in locations around town.

OK, so who in the Sam Hill is CVT?

In the mid-90s, I was a staff writer for the New Haven Advocate. I wrote hard news, investigative pieces, silly stories, about gender, finding my birth mother, court cases, fashion, even about living with cerebral palsy. One of my stories became a question on a Trivial Pursuit card (to me, better than a Pulitzer).

I left New Haven in 2005 for Pittsburgh where I launched an online hyperlocal called Pittsburgh Dish. It was an all-volunteer news site that I crafted out of whole cloth while folding laundry at my kitchen table. In the end, it had 30,000 monthly visitors. Cred: we got a 15 year-in-operation nuisance bar shut down by covering shootings there. Joanna Bernstein, our high school reporter, http://pittsburghdish.typepad.com/pittsburgh_dish/joanna_bernstein/index.htmll" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">exposed Rat Day (a day at a local wealthy high school where rich kids dressed up like poor kids) and changed school policy. Reporters from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Pittsburgh Tribune-Review contributed under pen names as they believed in our mission to cover stories that fell between the cracks. One of our writers - who'd never written before Dish - went on to write for other publications and recently signed a book deal to write about Appalachian artists. (If I have a superpower, it's finding and matching writers with suitable topics.)

I returned to Greater New Haven in 2013 to be with my mom, who got Alzheimer's after taking care of my Dad who also had it. I've wanted to do a print-only paper since then, especially having watched friends lose their newsroom jobs over the years.

Call me crazy, but I believe we can curb the fake news era with printed newspapers on the curb.

Bottom line: I'm 62. My spine is hinky and I hope to make this newspaper pipe dream happen before I become the crooked old lady reporter who lives in a crooked condo surrounded by her crooked stack of yellowed newspapers.

Thank you for reading and lending a hand.

"Editorial Door" photo by Kathleen Cei

Analog Girl Media logo by Ona McLaughlin