It's been nine months now since Eat The State! began inflicting weekly news and views on Seattle and beyond; three months since we expanded our print run and doubled our size to eight pages. So the folks who put out ETS! met last week--we don't meet very often, we just do stuff--to talk about how it's gone and where it's going.

Readership has kept growing steadily--print runs, mail subscriptions, and Internet access. And we're up to a couple dozen people who regularly help out with the all-volunteer ETS! production crew. We're becoming more diverse and less dependent on a handfu l of key people; as people take summer vacations, ETS! hopefully won't miss a beat. (ETS! takes a summer vacation, too; we publish 50 weeks a year, skipping the week between Christmas and New Years' and an issue in mid-July; there will be no July 15 issue next month.) Maria Tomchick is now helping Geov with editor duties, and we're also bringing more folks up to speed on research, writing, layout, production, and distribution. Whether with ETS! or any other publication, one of our goals is to encourage th e idea that everyone can and should speak out: we need alternative media in this country and in every community, we need a lot of it, and we all need to undo lifetimes of lessons that our personal voices and experiences don't matter. They do, and that's w hy otherwise sensible people work hard to put this paper out each week.

It does, however, take money. A major donor spotted us a cash reserve to enable us to go to eight pages; we're using it up, in the hope that by the time we exhaust it our eight-page, 1000+ copy/week size will be financially self-sustaining. So far, it's not; our income has increased each month but it's still far short of our e xpenses. (For May, we took in about $600 and spent about $1100).

So, the other part of our meeting was a discussion about money. We want to make up that $500/month gap, and summer is usually a slow time of year for any publication (much less one that's under a year old). And we don't want to waste our limited column in ches nagging readers for money. So here's the short plea: we need bucks. Ideally, we'd like to be self-sustaining at a much larger size--we could probably distribute twice as many copies in greater Seattle each week as we do now if we had the bucks. But w e don't, and we'd settle for being able to pay for what we're doing now. Please give.

In case you insist on incentives, be aware that soon we'll have fabulous new "Eat The State!" t-shirts with our famous Mission Statement. They're hot. Budget now to order dozens, for yourself and for anyone you know who's ever suffered through a meeting or had your job rewritten by a consultant.

Meantime, there's still plenty of room for people to help out, hang out, and mix it up with ETS!. We get together to fold and collate and gossip about the universe Monday evenings, 7 PM, Univ. Baptist Church in the U-District (47th & 12th NE). Thanks, onc e again, to everyone who's made the first nine months of ETS! such a joy and such a success!