We’ve made it about five months now, without any startup funding – thanks to your help.

More of you are reading us. And while we have our typos, I’m proud we’ve been able to write stories to tell you about things going on in Seattle that probably wouldn’t have been written about if we hadn’t tried this experiment.

But we’re down now to our last week of funding.

We’re still largely a volunteer effort; your contributions let us pay some people some money to keep going.

We’re trying to fill in some of the gaps as our old paper, the P-I, and others have had to lay off journalists. If you’ve enjoyed our work, please contribute, so we can add to the work of our colleagues.

We’ve been able to bring you more extensive coverage of issues during the campaign  such as the viaduct debate, the question of what happens if the project has cost overruns . We’ve gone deeper than other sites on Metro’s transit cuts and King County’s budget cuts . I’m proud that we’ve brought you stories of people or issues in our city and of the environment. We’ve been able to break a number of stories such as the $40,000 bonus given City Light’s superintendent, or the possibility of a smoking ban in city parks, a hate attack against a gay man on Capitol Hill, questions about the ridership on the South Lake Union streetcar.

We’ve brought you stories no one else has had about the death of a man with a fascinating history, the effect of the economy on a local circus , the death of a part of Ballard’s history ,  the possibility of open gun protests in the city, the fate of Seattle’s waterfront streetcars, a remnant of when horses filled city streets, and a  farewell to familiar ferries.

We’ve been able to bring insightful political stores that wouldn’t have appeared elsewhere. We’ve covered issues that haven’t gotten much publicity elsewhere such as the issue of deportations, “ Nickelsville ” and a personal story about those without health care.  We’ve also brought you features such as Rebekah  Denn’s food reviews, the film reviews of Sean Axmaker and Bill White. At a time when theater criticism is dwindling, we’ve been able to carry the theater reviews of Gianni Truzzi . Mariners reporter John Hickey is one of the best sports reporters in the area. While our focus is on local stories, we’ve been proud to run the stories from the Afghan News service about the important elections coming up in Afghanistan. And we’ve been able to give added exposure to some of our colleagues at other sites such as   KPLU , KUOW , KBCS  and the new land-use site, Northwest Hub .

You can donate by checks to our fiscal sponsor, KCTS, or by  credit card , or through our causes page on Facebook .

Times our tight, but we can keep going for a year if 1,000 people are willing to donate $10 a month.

If you’ve donated once, please consider making recurring donations.

If you haven’t yet donated, please consider donating the $240 price of a newspaper subscription, or whatever is comfortable.

If you’re willing to hold a fundraiser for our site, please contact me at kerymurakami@yahoo.com.

If you have donated, or if you haven’t but still support our work, please e-mail others, or forward our “Causes” page to others and encourage as many people as you can to donate.

Other sites in San Diego and Minnesota were able to start with the help of civic-minded people with means who were able to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars.  If you are able to raise significant amounts of money, please contact me at kerymurakami@yahoo.com.

We started this site hoping to launch a community effort in Seattle. Now it’s up to you.

We’d love to continue our work and be able to grow and do more to fill in some of the gaps in journalism here.