On May 22, 5:33 pm, samsloan wrote:

Websites are free. Nobody pays to view them.

a) They could put Chess Life on a protected page where you would need
a USCF member password to see it.

b) If the website costs a fraction of what printing costs (and
*editorial* costs are also small) then there would be a net savings to
members, even if anyone could read the site.

If editorial costs are NOT small - as is usually the case with a
quality magazine - the extra overhead of printing the magazine on
paper is indeed still the only way to recover the costs in a practical
manner, both through the sale of the magazine and by advertising.

Even when the printing costs are several times the printing costs.

If the USCF is dying for lack of membership, and there _is_ no way to
fix that - because, while all the standard measures to reach out to
the public are not bringing in enough new members, and it's purely
wishful thinking to suppose it could be otherwise if we just tried
harder - then it may be impossible to avoid all sorts of cutbacks and
paring down, even though these measures may make the problem even
worse.

A smaller organization that can pay its bills can survive, but a
bankrupt one cannot.

John Savard