Help to give theartsdesk a future!

It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com.

It followed some hectic and intensive months when a disparate and eclectic team of arts and culture writers went ahead with an ambitious plan – to launch a dedicated internet site devoted to coverage of the UK arts scene.

Many of our readers today may have forgotten the arts journalism atmosphere of the first decade of the new century – especially the decimation of traditional broadsheet arts coverage that followed the financial crisis of 2008.

Many of the contributors who came together for the launch of theartsdesk.com had previously been part of the freelance stable of The Daily Telegraph – though plenty of others joined from other previous cultural berths, where similar processes were underway. We wanted to continue to engage with what we loved, and were looking to do so in the new ways that the internet allowed. And no less importantly: we were determined to do so as an independent collective.

The challenge of those early development days was actually not about our mission statement – to bring readers the best cultural coverage we could, at the length and in the form that we believed it deserved – but building the technical base that allowed us to present a wide variety of daily material. Back in those days that was a real journey of discovery, and it was no less the achievement of the early site developers who assisted us (and their successors over the years) than the enthusiasm of our contributors that allowed theartsdesk.com to launch on that memorable September date.

We marked the 15th anniversary of theartsdesk.com on that same September day last month. The journey over those 15 years has been exhilarating but hard. We have published a huge quantity of fantastic writing, covering the breadth of artistic life; theatre, film, TV, music (classical, pop, opera, rock, and more – the whole lot!), ballet, books, comedy and much else. We have supported great artists at all points in their careers. We are proud to offer a level playing field where all art forms stand next to each other, equally.

It is fair to say that we’re a small but sturdy hub of British cultural life, a cog in the eco-system which keeps the arts, at all levels, functioning healthily.

But we have been running on a shoestring. We never have necessary funds to invest in strengthening and rebuilding as times change. We need financing to flourish, most of all to rebuild our now failing technical architecture, and to put in place systems that provide a foundation for our self-sufficient survival.

We urgently need assistance to be able to continue.

Without this, we will have to close in the very near future. This would be a depressing outcome. For us, of course, but also, we believe, for the UK arts scene as a whole.

So we are writing to you to ask if you could help to give theartsdesk.com a future.

To rebuild and survive, we must raise £100,000. We already have a solid pledge to the value of £30,000. Please can you contribute? Visit our GoFundMe page to do so.

With many thanks in advance for all the support you can offer,

theartsdesk team