Starting Next Issue, the SPARK Will Cost $2.00.

Jun 3, 2024

For 32 years, we have sold the SPARK for the same low price, $1, even while the prices of the daily newspapers went up. (The Detroit News is $3.49, the Los Angeles Times, $3.66, the Baltimore Sun, $4.00, and it costs $3.00 for the Chicago Sun Times, for example.)

If we had added up all the costs for putting out the SPARK, we would have increased the price long ago. But we kept the price at $1 because the militants who work with the SPARK spent time and effort to get donations to cover the growing deficit. This grew harder as costs went up.

We have to pay for printing the SPARK, shipping it, postage to mail it out, and some material. The cost for the newspaper does not include the effort to write it, or prepare it for the printer, or sell it on the street, or in front of the workplaces. The militants who work with the SPARK freely contribute their labor to do these things so the SPARK can exist.

The daily newspapers handle things differently. They sell advertising. But who buys the ads? Those with money, your bosses: the factory owners, the bankers, the insurance companies, hospitals, different store owners. Even the government authorities and … politicians.

In return for their money, they get a newspaper which pushes their point of view on all the economic and political questions of the day. When you buy those papers, you pay your money for something working against you.

When you buy the SPARK, you get a paper the bosses do not control, one which defends the interests of the working class.

So today we ask you to do something to make sure the SPARK keeps coming out. We ask you to pay $2 an issue to make sure that a paper that defends the interests of the working class continues to exist.