Following Feed Your Face Thursday, Black Friday (or Buy Nothing Day), Small Business Saturday and Cyber Monday in our Thanksgiving calendrical pantheon is a newer entry, Giving Tuesday. Founded in 2012, it was born in New York City at the famed 92nd Street Y out of the efforts of then-Y executive director Henry Timms and the United Nations Foundation, with support from the BLK SHP group. At the time, the concept was billed as a “global generosity movement unleashing the power of people and organizations to transform their communities and the world.”

Few communities are better at harnessing people power than Kingston. Like many worthy organizations and causes vital to our community, Kingston Wire is asking for a little bit of your money. A few months ago, we celebrated our fifth birthday. Starting from zero, over those five years we have built a base of tens of thousands of readers, many of whom decide to subscribe.

We’re proud of that, and we’re proud of the work we’ve done in 2025: Our reporting shined a light on the awful conditions at the Kingston Motel, where Ulster County was sending families in need of emergency housing. We’ve kept our readers up to speed on the complex debate and legislative machinations behind the effort to keep the Catskill Mountain Railroad bottled up in Kingston, as well as the never-ending drama surrounding the former IBM campus. Earlier this year, we wrote about the impacts of the changes in Washington D.C. on our lives here; later, we wrote about what happened when ICE came to town. We continue to write about how energy costs and infrastructure proposals, like solar farms and battery energy storage systems, affect local life. The precarious future of rent control in Kingston has gotten our attention, as has changes to the county’s UCAT bus system. We’ve continued our detailed and nuanced coverage of crime and public safety issues and the ongoing effects of gentrification. We’ve taken a deep dive into the legal tussle between the State of Texas and our county clerk, a dispute which may make it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. We’ve charted the twists and turns of the decades-long debate over Uptown’s Pike Plan, as well as the many lawsuits filed against the city by an Uptown landlord. We’ve described how changes in sales tax intake influence what our local governments decide to spend our money on. More recently, we’ve led the coverage of the disappearance of the principal at George Washington Elementary School, and the unexpected result of the Christopher Baldner trial.

Then there’s the not-so-flashy stuff that’s still important: from detailed coverage of city and county government and stories on local businesses young and old to bringing the focus on grassroots residents with our Real Lives of Kingston series.

We’re also proud of the columns we offer our readers: the unmatched local political knowledge and insight of Hugh Reynolds; the provocative business viewpoint of Raleigh Green; the heartfelt ground-level writing about local life of Barbara Magnoni and Jim Rich; and Robyn Hager’s energetic new column about the vibrant art scene in Kingston. Not to mention our editorials, where we offer our honest and unvarnished take on the events and the issues of the day. All this, and memes too.

For a city of under 25,000 people, Kingston certainly has a lot of stories, and we certainly love writing about them. No other publication covering Kingston has the variety of local writers and the breadth of subject matter. Whatever it may be, from a planning board meeting to a talk by sex workers, if it’s happening in Kingston, we want to write about it. For us, journalism — keeping the public in the know about what they need to know — isn’t a hobby or a job we have until something else comes along. It’s our life’s work. We love it, and we live it. All day, every day.

We’re immensely proud of what we’ve accomplished since going online in September 2020. We look forward to more growth and more interesting and insightful journalism next year. But to do that in 2026 and the years that follow, we need your support to make it all possible. Life isn’t getting any easier for independent local news outlets. More than 130 of our comrades around the country have closed this year, saddeningly similar to 2024’s local news loss. Those of us left continue to work hard because we know that we have to. We put a lot of effort into our work — we know it’s obvious when it’s there, and when it isn’t.

We’re asking for your help because we need your help. Please on this Giving Tuesday, where we all have the chance to put our money where our hearts are, think about supporting Kingston Wire by subscribing or making an additional donation to our new crowdfunding effort: https://givebutter.com/8gCFrR

We see what happens in communities without local news: befuddled residents have to go on social media with troubling frequency to try to find out what’s going on. Instead of reliable information from professional journalists committed to serving the public faithfully, all they get is a variety of mostly wrong and often obnoxious answers from local malcontents and faraway troll farms.

Please help us so that doesn’t happen here. Kingston deserves better. And thank you, always, for your support.