As you may have noticed, we’ve been adding some Hurley coverage into the Kingston Wire mix, and we’re really excited to be able to offer this new reporting for a location just to our west that up until recently (we’ve all been reading the headlines …) was barely on many folks’ radars.

Even before March 1, when former Ulster County Commissioner of Finance Burt Gulnick Jr. was removed as treasurer of the Hurley Recreation Association over what club officials called “financial discrepancies,” we were approached to cover the beautiful and historic Town of Hurley.

We get asked to cover additional communities all the time, but as we are stretched pretty thin, any additional coverage requires some startup capital.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves a bit.

Since we’ve been fielding some questions about our recent initiative to cover the Town of Hurley, the Editorial Team wanted to take this opportunity to explain just what we’re up to.

Earlier this year we were approached by Hurley Up, who asked us if we were interested in covering the Town of Hurley. Hurley Up, if you are unfamiliar, describes itself as an “independent, non-government supported community-based digital platform created to encourage greater awareness of our unique Ulster County town.” Hurley Up offered Kingston Wire a modest seed grant —meant to get the ball rolling, not to fund our efforts long-term. Most importantly, Hurley Up didn’t ask us to report things from one angle or another — we would not have agreed to such an arrangement anyway.

Instead, we insisted upon, and have, total editorial control over our Hurley coverage, just like we have total editorial control over our Kingston coverage. (We remain happily and fiercely independent.)

And we are, as stated previously, very excited about the opportunity to increase our coverage. Kingston doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and we are in the mix with Hurley, the 36-square mile town with just over 6,000 people (according to the 2020 census), as much as we are with the Town of Ulster, another bordering municipality with a lot going on.

It’s good to expand and offer more coverage, and the initial grant from Hurley Up to get our coverage started does just that. We have a wonderful and dedicated reporter, Maya, who lives locally and is young, intrepid and dialed-in to what’s going on.

It’s good for us as it helps Kingston Wire cover another part of the greater Kingston area, and it’s good for the people of Hurley because they’re getting a kind of meat-and-potatoes/here’s what happened at the meeting coverage they haven’t had in YEARS. This kind of reportage isn’t glamorous, but it’s necessary for an informed populace, and it makes a huge difference in a community to have it.

Toward that end, we want input from as many people in Hurley who are willing to offer it. We realize we’re coming into a community with its own issues and backstory, and it will take us some time to get up to speed. We thank everyone for their patience; if we get anything wrong in a story, we want to hear about it.

Some people in town may have some concerns, and we get that. But, as with Kingston Wire and our sister publication the Shawangunk Journal, we stand by everything we publish and will bring the same fair-minded reporting to Hurley that we do to Kingston and the communities of the Rondout Valley.

And it bears repeating something we’ve discussed here before. Local newsrooms have been forced to find new ways to fund their efforts. The internet wrecked the traditional funding model of newspapers, mostly advertising from a wide base of sources large and small. Those of us who know how important community journalism is have had to come up with a Plan B (and Plans C, D, E and F) to figure out how to pay for it. Some ways have been tried and found wanting, but one thing that works is underwriting, where a single donor or a pool of donors puts up money to get the ball rolling.

That’s how public media has always done it; one need only listen to WAMC or any other public radio station for a few minutes to hear somebody use that word.

Kingston Wire wouldn’t have happened without assistance in 2020 from Radio Kingston. The support lasted just a year, but Kingston Wire is still going strong three years later, with broader, more reliable support from readers and a few advertisers. Our coverage of Hurley wouldn’t be happening without the seed grant from Hurley Up. Our goal is to do a good job, so enough Hurley people subscribe to make further coverage possible. For publications that are primarily subscriber-supported, our readers are our core constituency.

So, check out our fledgling Hurley coverage. Let us know if there’s something out there we should be covering. And as we continue writing about Hurley over the next few months, we’ll let the quality of our work speak for us.

(Interested in writing a letter to the editor or becoming a columnist? Nice! Reach out to us at info@kingstonwire.com.)