Paul McNamee, UK Editor of The Big Issue, writes:
For the last number of years, The Big Issue has been thriving. We have produced a brilliant magazine that, every week, has helped thousands of people earn a lot of money to work out of poverty. That success has been down to you as our staff, our valued contributors, friends, supporters and others along the way who have flown the flag and helped us fight the fight.
We head into the unknown now. The streets will clear of people and this makes it immediately difficult for the many, many people, right on society’s margins, who rely on The Big Issue. We’re not going away. We’re going to do more. And we need you and your friends and family to help us.
I wanted to tell you about the things we are adapting quickly and rolling out. The magazine will be available in a variety of ways. You can buy individual physical copies at The Big Issue shop here. You can buy a subscription to the physical magazine, for a variety of lengths of time, here bigissue.com/subscribe - a gift for you or somebody already isolating.
And you can buy a digital copy here. It’s a good service. You can see as the magazine is a straightforward page-turner, or flick to HTML.
Sales from these sources will go to a central pot. We’re working out how best to get this to vendors when they’ll need it and I’ll keep you up to date on that as it develops.
We’re also working on a new app. This is some days away, but I’ll happily update on that too.
And from Monday, we’re putting the price of the magazine up to £3. The extra money will go straight to the vendor. The Big Issue will NOT take any additional revenue. Rather than a 50/50 split, vendors will receive £1.75 from each sale, and The Big Issue part will remain at £1.25. We believe this additional revenue will prove a great bonus to our vendors.
The solutions we’re coming up with are imperfect. We’ll make them better. The ground shifts under our feet hour by hour. For now, the key thing is to keep that ground as permanent as possible for the men and women who need The Big Issue.
Please share this far and wide. And thank you all for helping The Big Issue grow to what it is. We MUST fight on!
