13.11.2014

Striking a chord

It's not just the size of your readership that counts...

The problem with the wrong postage on issue 1032 of our paper (October 30) rumbles on. As readers will recall, that issue included the latest edition of Labour Party Marxist, but we didn’t stick on enough stamps - we were 4p short!

Some subscribers got a card from Royal Mail saying they needed to cough up the missing 4p (plus a £1 surcharge), but others have heard nothing after almost two weeks. While the original failing was obviously ours, this has been compounded greatly by RM apparently sitting on most of this mail without advising either their customers or ourselves. It was the first issue featuring the full-colour front page too!

Anyway, let me repeat: if you let us know you didn’t get your copy, we’ll extend your sub by a week to make up for it. Or else we’ll send you a replacement - just tell us which you prefer. We’ve already sent out a second copy to some people.

But this cock-up hasn’t put off our supporters from donating to the Weekly Worker. For example, TR decided to make a bank transfer for £30 - that definitely covered the cost of sending him a second paper! Then there was a £50 PayPal gift from new donor DS - thank you, comrade: it’s much appreciated. Plus £20 from regular contributor NW, using the same method, and two handy cheques from KL (£25) and FO (£20). Finally the standing orders from six regular donors this week totalled £128, which means we received £273 altogether.

That takes our running total up to £611, but, don’t forget, the target is now £1,750, which means we need another £1,139 in less than three weeks.

When it comes to online readers, it’s comrades in the USA who are still edging out those in Britain - we had 1,246 US visits, compared to 1,198 from the UK. Once again, those readership figures come with a health warning. I can’t really believe that we are only getting 2,768 visits all told, especially when you think that the monitor for our old website sometimes informed us we were getting 10 times more readers!

Well, I don’t know which set of figures is/was (more) accurate, but I do know that most of those readers really value their paper - our call for a consistent fight for Marxist unity on a principled basis strikes a chord with them. If you appreciate that message too, then you know what to do. Make a donation - or, better still, set up a standing order!