Power ALBB's Newsroom! How To Support Our Independant Journalism; What Readers Are Saying

Your way to support hyper local journalism with your dollar(s).
ALBB will forever be free to read and access. No pop-up ads. No Google ads.

If you can’t spend,
please support our sponsors and tell them you heard about them at A Little Beacon Blog.

Forever important to ALBB is informing you, the reader, community, and outside the community who also love Beacon in an easy and accessible way. A website producer for 20 years, Katie majored in Communications in Media Studies, and one class shy of a minor in Creative Writing from the College of Charleston (SC). Her favorite class was Ethics in Communication.

The dream was to to work in magazines, but there wasn’t enough money in that to afford her NYC apartment. So she worked for a national nonprofit specializing in evidence-based maternity care, where she designed and managed their website and donor database. Taking fashion drawing classes at night at FIT, she also began blogging. Blending visual and written storytelling was always a match for her.

Katie started blogging before Google went public, on their platform Blogger. She even helped the nonprofit install a Google Search Server onto their very large and resourceful content website. That’s why you find ALBB everywhere in Google. She knows how to weave her creative writing with SEO and website analytics. It’s a special combination of an art.

We accept $5, and $1,000, and everywhere in between and above. We already have some $5 monthly supporters, and honestly, those contributors mean so much to us because they wanted to commit just that much - anything - to powering the information they are reading. And now watching, now that we have brought video into the mix.

There are two ways to give:

SINGLE AMOUNT

Give any amount, any time.

RECURRING GIVING

Pick which monthly levels fits you:

• $5/mo Newshound

• $25/mo Bloodhound

• $50/mo Super Reader

• $100/mo Empowering Reader

• $1,000/mo Philanthropist Reader

Thank you for powering independent, local media!

Share this with a friend who loves supporting the arts and journalism.

Link to give: www.alittlebeaconblog.com/reader-support

Birthday Gift Wish During Permit Driving Session TO School

The Highlands Current Needs Your Help! Seeking Fundraising To Continue Covering Beacon

The Highlands Current is a local newspaper you’ve seen around town, stacked in storefronts, and now in the blue boxes that keep popping up on street corners. The paper is a nonprofit organization, and while they do rely on advertising, they count on individual donations more - 75% of publishing costs come from donors! The paper, which is distributed for FREE, is in the final, heated days of their big fundraising appeal, and needs Beacon’s help! Beaconites are so important to the publication, that the paper has invested in an ad campaign here at A Little Beacon Blog to help them get the word out. And you know we love helping to spread the good word.

Years ago, the Highlands Current was launched and covered Cold Spring, Garrison, Nelsonville and North Highlands. In 2015, they expanded their coverage to include Beacon by dedicating at least two reporters, Jeff Simms and Brian PJ Cronin, to cover the Beacon “beat” (newspaper term), as well as Alison Rooney to feature stories on the arts, Michael Turton with some articles (he also delivers the papers all around town) and Pamela Doan, the editor of the Calendar section that includes Beacon events in their roundup. And now I too have joined the ranks as a columnist with my “Kid Friendly” column over there. If you attend City Council or Board of Education meetings, you stand a good chance of seeing Jeff or Brian in the unofficial “press box” (aka somewhere in the front rows).

Highlands Current Quick To Report On Important Issues

Thanks to this dedication, The Highlands Current is often the first to report on big changes coming out of our City Council - changes that impact your daily life here in Beacon. Also because of this investment, their reporters follow different events each week at these meetings, so are super familiar with the twists and turns the issues make, and often weave these significant details into their articles for better context. Because they print on paper, a newspaper doesn’t get to use as much space as a blog does, so often they have to select their words so carefully, and cram hours’ worth of events and pages of supporting documents into three tiny paragraphs!

The paper published this picture to show how two Beacon Reporters work from the Telephone Building through Beahive’s shared office space.

Beacon Newspaper Reporters Work From The Telephone Building

Little known fact to bolster your Beacon trivia base: The Highlands Current stations their reporters out of the Telephone Building in Beahive’s shared work space. A Little Beacon Blog also has our office in the Telephone Building! It’s fun to be in a communications hub like this.

Fundraising Opportunity - Double Match Going On Now ’Til December 31!

Thanks to a grant from NewsMatch and an anonymous donor, any contribution from $1 to $1,000 will be matched two times until December 31! Even if you gave just $10, it matters!

Yes, the dollars help, but new donors are equally important. New donors signal to the newspaper that you care, and you want their coverage to continue. If you have already donated to the Highlands Current this year, consider asking your spouse or best friend to also donate if they haven’t yet. #NewDonorAlert!

PS: If you are reading this article after December 31, 2018, you can still donate! Every little bit helps.

Raffle: Chance For A Kid To Win A Ride To School On A Fire Truck

If you missed this event last year, you have another chance to enter your kid to win a ride in a fire truck! Each $5 ticket into Rombout’s Raffle helps raise money for the eighth-grade Washington DC trip. This raffle’s grand prize is a ride to school in a fire truck driven by the City of Beacon Fire Department and Slater Chemical Fire Company. Your child could be picked up at home - in a fire truck - and driven to school!

One kid from each of the four elementary schools in the Beacon City School District (South Avenue, Glenham, J. V. Forrestal and Sargent) will be selected as winners. Flyers went home in the little kids’ folders, so fill those out and send in money with your tickets - $5 per ticket or 3 tickets for $10! There is no limit to how many tickets you can buy.

If you want to buy several raffle tickets and need to print more raffle forms/tickets, you can print out the raffle form tickets here and keep sending them in, just in case riding to school in a fire truck sounds TOO COOL and you really want to increase your chances.

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This is a highlight from A Little Beacon Blog’s School Opportunities Guide. There are more special events listed there, plus ways you can effortlessly donate to one of the schools in our district, through glass bottle collection, box tops, and other easy ways.