Reading through the editor's e-mail the topic of one of the letters caught my attention. Like the editor of the Langalist, a weekly subscription newsletter, I was surprised to see that a few of our readers questioned why we send out free newsletters and actually scoffed at the idea that newsletters cost money to produce. They can't phantom the cost of desktop publishing or how writing one email newsletter and then sending copies to a list of people can possibly cost anything.

"How can an electronic newsletter that does not contain glossy prints, high end paper and doesn't require being shipped by overnight carrier to each subscriber, cost anything at all," the e-mails scream. My editor goes through the roof when she gets mail like that.

"Can you imagine them thinking that trying to send over 5000 PRESSPOINTS NetNews emails by hand is easy?" she points out. "Even CCs or BCCs wouldn't help much, as most ISPs cap the number of recipients of any one email. We have to baby-sit our transmissions because we can't afford to rent time/space on a high speed mailing list server that can mail all of our newsletters in a short period of time, as well as handle our growing list of subscribers. We also pay to maintain our professionally-maintained high-capacity web sites (4pointspress.com, .net, and .org; prensa4puntas.com, .net. and .org which collectively pump out something like 12GB of web pages and files to you every month), plus space on a secure server (that's 6 web sites total); all to support the newsletter operations and archives, email, file downloads, mirroring, and so on. Of course, we don't want to remind anyone of the equipment in all our homes (12 PCs and their companion pieces), nor do we want to remind anyone of the time and effort it takes to write all that content and make it all happen. Free? There is no such thing as free!"

After taking a deep breath, she exclaims, with a smile, "Thank God that most people 'get it', keep up their subscriptions and read us."

EDITOR'S NOTE:
Due to our heavy load in developing our own as well as other organization's sites Ginny has sacrificed her own articles, over these last two months, to help us get PRESSPOINTS out and published. We thank her. Contact her on site; http://www.4pointspress.com or direct your email to the Editor.