Letter From Martin Denton

From Mr. Martin Denton, founder/editor/chief reviewer for nytheatre.com, nytheatrecast.com and indietheater.org:

Hello!

I'm writing to nytheatre.com's readers and supporters to update you about what we've been up to, and to ask for your help in making 2008 our best year ever.

This year has been particularly exciting for us, as we've transformed from web publisher to new media producer. Most of you probably know me as the editor and founder of nytheatre.com, but I am also its designer-webmaster-systems developer, and the changes in my job over the past 12 months have been numerous and important.

As I hope you have been noticing, we have been working hard to enhance and upgrade our website, adding features like interactive venue maps, improving the site's look and feel, and providing more customization and reader-friendliness to all our web pages. We've entered the world of "Web 2.0" with our regular nytheatrecast podcast series, our four blogs, our newsfeeds, and other features that enable our readers to engage actively with our content.

We've expanded our enterprise from one website -- nytheatre.com -- to four websites: indietheater.org is home to detailed coverage of the exciting and blossoming independent theater scene in NYC; nyte.org is our corporate website and includes an online "catalog" of our play anthologies; and nytheatrecast.com is home base for our weekly podcasts.

We launched mobile.nytheatre.com this summer, providing (as far as we know) the first dedicated theatre site for folks who access the web via cellphone, Blackberry, iPhone, PDA, etc. The first release of mobile.nytheatre.com includes detailed venue info along with new reviews, our reviewers' picks, and ticket discounts. Much more is planned for mobile.nytheatre.com 2.0 which should launch in 2008.

Which brings me to some of our other plans for next year. We're hoping that in 2008 we will provide more coverage of theatre in NYC's suburbs, deeper coverage of indie theater companies, and more interactive mapping, to name just three planned areas of expansion.

We're also working on utilizing the latest Internet advances -- everything from blogging to social networking to tagging and more -- so that nytheatre.com and our other websites can become even more useful resources for the theatre community. We will be harnessing these new technologies so that you can access the information you need more quickly and more easily, and so that you will have more choices about how this information is provided and more opportunities to interact with it. There's a heap of content about the New York theatre scene on the World Wide Web these days; nytheatre.com and its "sister sites" will be here to help you find it, navigate it, and make sense of it.

Of course, all of this requires sufficient funding to make it happen. We've actually reduced some of our costs during the past year by moving to more efficient web hosting partners and adopting an open source software development platform for our technology. But even with these economies, our annual budget needs to grow to accommodate the new projects and programs that I mentioned above.

While we are supported in part by the New York State Council on the Arts and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, and by a few foundations, we rely on contributions from you, our readers and supporters, to meet nytheatre.com's operating costs each year.

So as we enter our 11th year as a free resource to the New York theatre community on the web and elsewhere, I ask you to please make a donation. Any amount will be vitally helpful to us: $10, $25, $50 ... $100 or $500 if you can afford that. At whatever level you choose, your generous gift will be greatly appreciated and gratefully acknowledged, and it will go directly toward development of the exciting and significant new programs we are planning for 2008.

Please follow this link to make a secure credit card donation at our shop.nyte.org website:

http://shop.nyte.org/donatetonyte.aspx

Because we are a 501(c)(3) charitable organization, your contribution is deductible as allowed by state and federal income tax laws.

If you prefer to make your donation by check, please send it to:

The New York Theatre Experience, Inc.
P.O. Box 1606
Murray Hill Station
New York, NY 10156

Thank you for reading this and thank you in advance for helping us grow nytheatre.com to meet the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead in 2008 and beyond. I am so excited about making our websites into resources that are increasingly fun, helpful, and valuable to our readers. Please let me know how we're doing!

And have a joyous and safe holiday season.

Best regards,

Martin

Martin Denton
Editor/Founder/Producer
nytheatre.com
nytheatrecast.com
indietheater.org