ARCHIVED - The last FREE Murcia today Weekly Bulletin

During the last week the world has become a different place.

For those of us here in Spain the lockdown began a week ago and this morning it has been announced that the period of confinement will be amplified until 12th April, bringing the country to a halt as our government attempts to isolate the existing cases of coronavirus and limit its spread.
 
During this time most businesses are being forced to close down, the knock-on effects of which will bring widespread economic uncertainty, an inevitable recession and stark, unpleasant decisions about staffing which many businesses will be forced to face, including our own.
 
Within 10 minutes of the lockdown in Murcia being announced the meltdown began and we received emails from our largest sponsors cancelling their campaigns. Since then we have taken drastic measures to cut every conceivable cost, find any stream of revenue available and analyse the options to continue delivering news and information in ENGLISH to our readers, as we have done for the last 11 years.
 
We understand that our readers may not have considered how much it costs to publish Murcia Today and deliver this product for FREE, but it’s expensive; every word on the site is written by a bi-lingual person being paid a salary to do so, as all of our information is taken from Spanish speaking councils, governments and the many, many sources we use to compile it, none of whom publish their information in English.
 
We also have a relentless and costly programming battle against hackers who are so determined to get into the site, and adding in maintenance, security, hosting and multiple other costs, it’s always a fine balancing act maintaining viability, even when it’s a “normal “ week.
 
 In order to keep our product free we have always found advertisers and businesses willing to pay for our services, but this has all changed during the last week.
 
In the last 12 months over 2,500,000 absolutely unique readers read the 55,000 unique articles published on our site. If we could get every one of the people who have used our services for FREE in the last 12 months to pay just 10 cents, then we wouldn´t be facing a difficult decision. But we can´t.
 
So, to get to the point, we have to make changes.
 
We intend to maintain the webpage Murcia Today (www.murciatoday.com) for FREE and once the lockdown is over will continue seeking businesses and advertisers to cover the costs of operation, although we are under no illusions that this will be extremely challenging as so many businesses will also be facing financial difficulties after a month with no income and the world in turmoil.
 
We understand that for non-Spanish speakers the information we provide is an important bridge and the fact that so many people use the site reflects the need for what we do, but the volume of material we can produce now depends on our ability to find revenue.
 
Looking at the ways in which we could cut costs but continue to maintain the Murcia Today site FREE, it became apparent that the FREE Weekly Bulletin and News Flash service could be TERMINATED, saving a lot of costs and time.
 
However, if only a small number of those receiving the Weekly Bulletin which we’ve delivered free for 11 years were willing to support a paid subscription model, then this would secure the product and maintain sufficient resource to deliver a similar quantity and quality of material.
 
So today we will be publishing the last FREE Bulletin and asking those who have received the bulletin all these years to convert to a paid subscription only format.
 
We’re not asking you to support us, we’re asking if you are willing to pay for the bulletin service.
 
If readers decide that they don´t want to pay for the bulletin service and insufficient numbers subscribe to maintain the resources needed to create the product, then we will refund the subscriptions of those who were happy to pay for it and close down the service.
 
After a brutal week we ourselves are absolutely resigned to the possibility that readers may decide they don´t want to pay, but are equally realistic about the impossibility of maintaining the service we offer with greatly reduced revenue, and know for certain that it will not be possible to deliver the same level of service to the expat community if we can´t retain the resource to write the material.
 
So it’s over to you. If you enjoy receiving our bulletin then please subscribe to do so and thank you to all those businesses whose support over the years has paid for the creation of the English language content we have published for the benefit of our readers.

 
Laurence & Zoe Cooper 
 

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