Elmer Ploetz
Buffalo Hive Editor-in-Chief

Sometimes significant things happen and you don’t even realize it because you’re so busy. 

That was the case about 10 days ago. Here at The Buffalo Hive, we posted Monica Power’s daily music and community listing to start the day. 

Then we published Jason Pomietlasz’s Comedy Buzz and a piece on the “Old PInk” art pop up at the Buffalo History Museum. 

Then we posted the “How Can We Help?” story on Journey’s End Refugee Services. Plus Melinda Miller’s theater review of “The Last Five Years” and a note on the performer lineup for the Nietzsche’s fundraiser for the Mulligan’s Brick Bar workers who lost their jobs when the place burned down. 

We published M. Faust’s film review of “The Room Next Door” and, finally, Jeff Mier’s “Where the Bands Are” roundup. 

It was exactly one week after The Buffalo News announced it was folding its Gusto section back in with the rest of the paper, effectively eliminating the last vestiges of what had been a must-read arts and culture section for decades. 

The next morning when I stopped to think about it, I realized that we had done online almost everything that Gusto had been offering in hard copy for all of those years. 

We had coverage of music, theater, film, comedy, art and cultural issues, some of it coming from people formerly associated with Gusto.  If you checked our Events Calendar section, you would find hundreds of events. 

I’m deeply saddened by the passing of Gusto. My byline ran there many times over the years, including some cover stories. I reviewed a lot of records, CDs and concerts there. 

But I wasn’t surprised to see it becoming a thing of the past. In the final issue there were, I believe, three ads. A print publication can’t survive on that. 

But an online nonprofit journalism is a different kind of thing. According to the Institute for Nonprofit News, there are over 475 nonprofit journalism organizations in the U.S. right now (including Buffalo’s Investigative Post, which has been doing outstanding work for over a decade now). 

We’ve been working on building a new model of journalism that emphasizes collaboration and outreach in the community. We’ve been covering a truly wide array of stories and creating the deepest event calendar we possibly can. 

We want to be the place where people can go to find what events are going on and to read stories about those things. And one of our key tenets is that we pay our writers.

Our goal is to keep getting better and doing more. We’re proud of the support we’ve received already, but to keep building this we’re going to need more. More income, more volunteers and, sometimes I think, more hours in the day. 

So thank you to everyone who has been along for the ride so far; please tell everyone you know about it! 

Keep an eye out here. We’ve got some really cool things in the works that we’ll be telling you about soon. 

Gusto’s star may have set, but we’re ready to move on to the next level.