By Gil Asakawa
The Pacific Citizen is about to sprout from a very long winter and bask in the sunshine. And you will provide the nourishing water to help the P.C. bloom.
The small but dedicated P.C. staff needs your help more than ever during its 2014 Spring Campaign in order to upgrade computer software and equipment to improve the P.C. and take the newspaper to the next level of excellence.
Many of you have supported the Spring Campaign in the past, so you already know how important your donations have been.
Your generosity every year has helped the P.C. keep up with technology and upgrade to the latest computer equipment and better cameras — the tools of the journalism trade. The Spring Campaign has even raised enough in the past to pay for a staff salary.
We’re aiming for that kind of support from all of you once again.
This year, after two years of not being updated, we want to make the P.C.’s website a priority. The proposed future of the Pacific Citizen is a digital one, which means we need to make sure that pacificcitizen.com is a reliable source for JACL’s news and information, as well as all news affecting the Asian American community. It’ll be competing with other news sites that address issues affecting the Japanese American and broader Asian American communities.
We’ll also have new ways for you to find articles and other content. Of course, we’ll maintain the important historical archives of the P.C. going back to the earliest issues in the 1930s.
And we’ll begin featuring more of the types of content that the Internet allows: videos, multimedia, slideshows and other modern ways to tell stories.
To do all of these cool things and deliver the best possible website for you our dedicated members and subscribers, we need the resources to once again upgrade our software and some of our equipment.
With your help, the P.C. will continue to be the most important connection you have to JACL and all Asian American news and evolve that connection into the digital era that looms before us.
I’ll see you online in the months to come!
Gil Asakawa is a former P.C. Editorial Board chair and current P.C. Editorial Board member. He is also the Japanese answer authority at www.japaneseanswers.com and blogs at (TK).
Originally published on April 18, 2014
