A while back, I got this email:
Scott, I noticed that the UU Voice website is down. Do you have any idea if the UU Voice is still around? I’m not a UU, but I hate to see independent UU publications go under.
Well, the good news is that the UU Voice (uuvoice.org) domain is still registered to editor Mike Durall and will be good for another eleven months without renewing.
The bad news? The magazine has been declining for some time. My concern about failing independent affiliate organizations had the UU Voice (and its sponsor, UU Advance) squarely in mind. Its loss — assuming it is really gone — is unfortunate, but print small, denominational print publications are going to have a hard time in all quarters.
If you missed the magazine, you can recall its accomplishments courtesy of the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.
ChaliceChick summarized the situation best more than a year ago and, while I don’t endorse all the tea-leaf reading therein, she gets the last word.
Here’s some lengthy reflections of mine on what UU Voice could have become — and what other small periodicals could do if they embraced the Web.
Yeah, too bad about that.
A dissident UU minister told me about The Voice. Somehow I got an address and mailed off an inquiry. Many months later they sent me a free issue. It was great – I shared an essay by Rev Tom Schade with several friends in my congregation. There was another very good article by somebody from the Commission on Appraisal.
So I bought three one-year subscription—one for me and one each for two friends. About eight months later, one of my friends got an issue. I hadn’t gotten mine. I went online and found a UU Voice website; I was going to complain about not getting my issue. But it didn’t have an email or a phone number. I meant to write a letter but I never got around to it. I never saw any issues. I don’t know how many issues my friends saw.
Hey, I understand that these things are a labor of love and they aren’t in it for the money. But putting an email or phone number on a website seems like some sort of a minimal competency.
I’ve offered Durall help getting a bloggish version of it up on more than one occasion. He’s not interested. A shame, really.
But maybe someone else will have better luck. Or maybe he’d just turn the domain over to someone so they can run with it.