It’s The Border Chronicle’s One-Year Anniversary!

The Border Chronicle has reached a pinnacle moment: Our one-year anniversary!

Back in June, we gave you the disappointing, but not surprising, news that Substack’s local reporting initiative funding would not continue into 2023. That’s okay, because Substack never promised another year of funding, but still we hoped! And we’re thankful to them for giving us the seed money to start The Border Chronicle.

After our June SOS post a number of you wonderful readers became paid subscribers, which was hugely encouraging. At $6 a month or just $60 annually it’s a bargain and you help us keep the lights on at The Border Chronicle. Some folks even signed up as founding members for $125, for which we are incredibly grateful. We hope more of you will do the same today and in the coming weeks.

Support The Border Chronicle today!

Because here we are at year two, and we’re feeling pretty positive about the future, though admittedly we still have a long way to go to hit our goal of 2,000 paid subscribers. We figure 2,000 paid subscribers, which would generate around $120,000, would allow both of us to earn (sort of) a living wage, pay for our reporting trips and expenses, and pay Pablo and Lilly our respective text and podcast editors.

Here’s where we’re at now: We have more than 3,000 subscribers (hooray!), which includes 427 paid subscribers. This means our annual revenue is just shy of $28,000, which after taxes, expenses etc. doesn’t leave a whole lot.

With your help, we have great ambitions to expand The Border Chronicle with more posts and podcasts, and we’d love to commission other reporters to provide even more local on-the-ground coverage from the U.S.-Mexico border for our readers. At the moment, the only thing we have behind a paywall is our discussion threads with invited experts, which have been hugely informative and spurred lots of fascinating discussions about everything from President Biden’s “smart” border to Title 42. We hope to receive enough paid subscribers that we don’t need to put anything else behind a paywall, because we’d like The Border Chronicle to be accessible to everyone.

And if you’re new to The Border Chronicle, let us introduce ourselves: We are Melissa del Bosque and Todd Miller, two longtime border journalists based in Tucson, Arizona. For nearly 20 years Melissa reported on the Texas-Mexico border, and Todd on the Arizona border, before we joined forces in Tucson.

In the last year, we’ve published more than 80 articles with on-the-ground reporting, and analysis. We’ve also published podcast interviews, photo essays, op-eds, and Q&As with people in the borderlands. We have talked about border theater (and the opportunistic use of the border for political campaigning), climate change, technology, militia groups (or armed “humanitarian” groups if you will), and the border wall, among many other things. Our reporting has brought you stories from along the nearly 2,000 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border, all the way from south Texas to southern California.

Since the get go, we have considered our work to be a rich discussion with you, and we remain committed to bringing more discussion threads and public forums moving forward.

In August, we did our first public forum in Patagonia, Arizona, at The Tin Shed Theater and it was a blast. The event co-hosted by Sierra Club Borderlands and Voices from the Border was packed, and we covered everything from border journalism to critical environmental issues around the border wall. We’ll be posting the podcast from the event soon for subscribers.

We are incredibly grateful for this past year, and grateful for the relationship that we have cultivated with you, our readers and podcast listeners. With your support, we hope we can continue to provide you stories often missed or overlooked by the mainstream media.

Please let us know how we’re doing, and what kind of stories you’d like to see more of in the coming months. Send us an email a theborderchronicle@protonmail.com or a letter to P.O. Box 12136, Tucson, Arizona, 85711. We look forward to hearing from you! We appreciate you becoming a part of this journey with us.

All our very best,

Melissa and Todd