25 years-strong…
It’s had its ups and its downs, its suspended print schedule and its off-schedule over the last 25 years, but it hasn’t folded. And it won’t.
The Animals Voice was first published as a six-page newsletter for the state of New Jersey (when Laura Moretti, its founder and editor) lived there, as a means to unite the state’s humane organizations — for that ‘strength in numbers’ philosophy Laura believes in. She published about three issues before she and the staff of then Agenda magazine met over a vegan meal in Bridgeport, CT. Seems they all had the same idea: to foster unity among animal defenders nation- and worldwide with a magazine.
Laura then suspended production of The Animals Voice in order to devote her time and effort to redesigning Agenda and helping to get it rolling on a national level. The new look worked and Agenda became a household word among animal rights activists who, until then, had felt alone in the world with their feelings and thoughts about animals.
Agenda then outgrew itself; its new editors and production goals forced Laura to abandon it and return to her personal passion: The Animals Voice.
Renaming it The Animals Voice Magazine: The California Connection, Laura began producing the publication for the state of California, to unite its some 300 animal welfare and rights organizations; Laura had just moved back to her high school hometown and immediately set to work on the magazine. Six issues into production and the magazine found a new publisher, a generous businessman in Los Angeles who published it internationally.
Still Kicking
Since 1986, The Animals Voice Magazine has remained true to its original purpose: it is independent of any organization so it’s free to report the news, campaigns, goals, philosophies, and other outreach message from any and all groups working on behalf of animals around the world.
It has also retained its promise to ‘not hold back’ when it comes to exposing the atrocities committed against animals. Its photography, as well as its editorial, is strong.
Nearly 50 issues of The Animals Voice Magazine have been published since its inception. On more than one occasion (in fact, about half a dozen times), the magazine had to suspend production — either because it didn’t have the funding to continue at that specific time or because its founder and editor, Laura Moretti, had to time-out, such as when she suspended magazine publishing for half a year in order to teach herself web design and production. Now, along with the magazine, the web site reaches roughly 1.5 million visitors and potential readers each year.
These are digital times and, though the magazine is available in a digital format, it could reach a larger audience if it made itself available to worldwide Internet users for FREE. One of our goals is to acquire the funding necessary to make the magazine available to digital mobile devices — for FREE — in order to reach a much broader audience. Not only will the past couple of years worth of issues be made available in this way, but so will all 50 of the issues, for a digital archive of a magazine that has spanned the past two and a half decades. It will serve as a documentary of sorts, a printed history of an animal rights movement that has gone through as many changes and redirections. What is past is prologue, as the proverb goes.
Imagine this: because of your donation, every issue — hundreds of pages of pictures and editorial, investigative reports and poetry, campaigns and issues — will be made available to the digital world for free. iPad, iTouch, laptop computers, and the like, will be able to easily access the magazine with the click of a mouse. The Animals Voice Magazine inspired a generation of activists; perhaps it will do so again.
The Animals Voice web site debuted in 2000. With a small grant from a big supporter, Animals Voice founder Laura Moretti was able to teach herself web design. More than a decade ago, The Animals Voice arrived online.
Like its magazine, The Animals Voice web site has remained true to its promise to animals: to be independent of any organization, so that it can bring its worldwide audience the news of every organization, the campaigns and action alerts of every organization, the struggles and the victories of every organization. The Animals Voice is beholden to no one and no thing — except animals.
