A Letter from Lisa Harris and Video Library

In A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche DuBois declaims, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” Today, the Santa Fe Reporter is depending on the kindness of friends. Specifically with its Friends of the Reporter program.

You can donate cash, check, card, euros, rubles, whatever, and that generosity identifies you as part of a larger community effort to keep our town’s one and only independent weekly newspaper to remain solvent, publishing, and available everywhere, for free.

Santa Fe is so lucky. We revel in the world-class aspects of a big city—symphonies, museums, fine dining, opera, film, every art form imaginable—all without traffic, smog, and crowds (except for Paseo de Peralta during Indian Market).

The climate breeds local indie shops, small, amazing, and service-driven. Music, books, and yes, even video. Indies all. Rare entities all. Just like the Santa Fe Reporter.

Sometimes, though, I suspect our town does not understand how fragile its institutions are, because we still have them on an everyday basis. They have not disappeared, as in so many other zip codes, now bereft of such amenities, be it due to economy, pandemic, or plain old zeitgeist.

You don’t know what you got ‘til it’s gone.

Video Library is not gone.

Now 40 years old, the Vid has been supported by the Reporter a lot over the decades. Back in the 2000s, it was a thrill when Reporter readers consistently voted it “Best of Santa Fe.” But as video stores closed one by one, finally the Reporter could no longer fill the three voting slots, as the home media industry turned into a dinosaur.

However, our Back Page ad in the Reporter has helped keep us alive. Ongoing response to the ad has been, well, responsive. People definitely peruse the back cover. It has always been a weekly printout of the local pulse. That ad reminds movie buffs that Video Library is still here. Even in mid-2020, when the world was barricaded, our ad kept assuring people that yes, the Vid abides. Keeping your name out there is everything.

Basically, if your business or service needs some media exposure, there is nothing more interactive than the Reporter’s Back Page.

Oh, you say do you not have a local business, so why advertise? Fine. Just give the Reporter some money!

Consider:

What if our blue skies vanished?

What if we could no longer see the mountains?

What if there were no river?

Well, our local institutions invoke the same response of disbelief.

Thus we implore you: Do not let the Santa Fe Reporter become another Beloved Memory like La Tertulia, Nicolas Potter Books, Yucca Drive-In—all gone, all still mourned.

Ergo, do not let the Santa Fe Reporter go the way of locally focused papers like the Los Alamos Monitor, the Rocky Mountain News, and, indeed, the Village Voice, which the Reporter most resembles.

It has been our hometown weekly since 1974.

Please: Help keep it that way.

Lisa Harris

Owner/operator,

Video Library

***

This letter from Lisa Harris is part of a series about Friends of the Reporter, a community model for supporting our journalism mission. Visit sfreporter.com/friends, to make a one-time or recurring donation or via check at PO Box 4910, Santa Fe, NM 87502. The New Mexico Local News Fund will match up to $3,000 in donations received through the end of 2021. Those who donate before Dec. 31 are eligible to enter a drawing for a necklace from Jane Hruska, a hand-blown Murano glass centerpiece, red with black streaks, on a silver omega chain.