What you hold in your hands is an immaculate distillation of much that is good and holy in the region. And I don’t use the word “holy” lightly. (Maybe I do.) Regardless. There’s a reverence to print—the smell of ink, the heft of pages—that carries the weight of permanence. You can dog-ear it, leave it on the kitchen counter, decoupage your bathroom with it, press a flower between its pages, and years from now someone may stumble across it and remember a concert, a play, a restaurant that once was. Print has aura. Print has presence.
But the ink and paper are just an amuse-bouche. The amuse bouche-ette, even. Online, the banquet table stretches out for acres. At Chronogram.com we’re publishing two to three new stories every single day—more than 60 a month—on art, food, music, environment, civic life, and the strange, wonderful miscellany that makes the Hudson Valley what it is. (Wonderful Miscellany Digression: Have you visited RAE BK’s immersive house-world Faraday Cage in Kerhonkson yet?!? It’s open through November 30.) The magazine gives you the highlights, the website is the overflowing cornucopia.
The Joy of the Kaleidoscope
In the past couple of weeks alone, we strolled through warehouses and backyards reimagined as galleries during Newburgh Open Studios, to spend time with artists like Theresa Gooby and Ashley Lyon. We laced up our boots for the new Schunnemunk Meadows Trail in Orange County, a 220-acre sweep of wildflower meadows folded into the larger state park thanks to the Open Space Institute’s conservation efforts.
We peered in the windows of Union Street’s Brewing Co.’s Kingston expansion, a Hudson taproom daring to grow without losing its charm. We crouched low to watch chalk artists transform Tivoli’s streets into radiant, temporary, masterpieces during the Tivoli Street Painting Festival.
We reviewed Jean Shin’s “Bodies of Knowledge” at the Dorsky, where mountains of obsolete phones and keyboards become hulking sculptures that ask what all our digital detritus really adds up to. We dropped quarters into pinball machines at Rhinebeck’s new High Score Arcade + Cafe, proving that Pac-Man pairs surprisingly well with an IPA.
On the runway, we covered Hudson Valley Sustainable Fashion Week’s Organic Runway at Rose Hill Farm in Red Hook, where designers repurpose and redesign clothing that asks: What if style could save the planet? And with somber clarity, aquatic ecologist Stuart Findlay pointed out that the Hudson River is projected to rise three feet by the end of the century. Three feet. Not metaphor, not poetry—hard data that will redraw the shoreline, the maps, the lives of those who live at the water’s edge.
Taken together, these stories are a kaleidoscope. Tilt it slightly and the patterns change: art, environment, food, science, history, civic life. Each new turn refracts the Hudson Valley back at itself, dazzling and disorienting, beautiful and sometimes alarming. Print captures some of this. Online, we capture all of it. Print captures some of this. Online, we sketch a larger map—never the whole territory but enough contours and landmarks to recognize the lay of the land.
Events as Cultural Glue
And then there’s our events calendar, one of the most overlooked public services Chronogram offers. As of this morning, September 22, it held exactly 1,080 events, from Adrenalize, the ultimate Def Leppard Experience at Daryl’s House, to Zumba at the Gardiner Library. You can filter by category, by town, by date, by your particular whims. Want live music on a Tuesday? A mushroom walk in Margaretville? An art opening in Beacon? It’s there.
Better still, anyone can upload an event. Free. No gatekeepers. If you’ve got something to share with the region—a reading, a fundraiser, a neighborhood cleanup—you can add it to the calendar and suddenly the whole Hudson Valley has a shot at showing up. It’s cultural glue, the connective tissue between people and place, made visible in pixels.
A Personal Digression: The Inbox as River
I sometimes think of our email newsletters as little boats on the Hudson. Five a week, setting sail with curated cargo: articles, events, highlights, curiosities. Some of them sleek, others a bit ramshackle, but each headed downstream into inboxes across the valley. Much of this fleet is captained by my colleague Marie Doyon, our digital editor, who curates with such taste and personality that you can practically hear her voice at the tiller. If you haven’t yet subscribed, consider this your invitation to hop aboard—there’s always room on deck, and the view of the Valley from the water is unmatched. Subscribe here or here:
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The metaphor isn’t perfect, but then again, neither is the inbox. What is perfect is the rhythm: every week, without fail, we launch these boats. They carry the best of what we publish, more than you could possibly catch by refreshing our homepage or swiping through Instagram. And they’re free. You can subscribe today and by tomorrow you’ll be better informed about the rhythms of this valley than your neighbor who insists he gets all his news from Facebook.
The Peculiar State of Print in 2025
Now, let me step back. Being the editor of a print magazine in 2025 is a little like being a vinyl enthusiast in the age of Spotify. People sometimes look at me as though I’m indulging in a quaint hobby. (“You still…print things? On paper?”) Guilty as charged. You’re holding the evidence. But print is no longer the whole picture.
It used to be that the magazine was the alpha and the omega: the deadline loomed, the issue went to press, and then we all decamped to Blockbuster to rent VHS tapes. Today, the magazine is one part of a larger ecosystem. Online publishing hums along every day, the newsletters beat their weekly pulse, the events calendar fills in the connective tissue. Print remains glorious, tactile, holy—but it is no longer sufficient on its own.
Why We Ask for Support
Here’s the crux: Chronogram has always been free to readers. Free in print, free online, free in your inbox. That’s part of our mission—cultural coverage as a public good. But our journalism is not free to produce. Writers, editors, photographers, designers—they’re not elves. They don’t live on joy alone (though joy is part of the compensation package). Servers need paying, printers need ink, and every story you read is the product of labor.
So I’ll end with a direct ask: if you value what you hold in your hands—this immaculate distillation—or what you scroll through on your phone—the kaleidoscope in real time—please consider supporting our work. Think of it less as charity and more as civic participation, a vote of confidence in the idea that regional culture matters. That telling our own stories matters. That the region deserves a chorus, not a monologue.
We’ve been working on the website, and the socials, all the live long day. With your support, we’ll keep working—into the night, into the next morning, into whatever future the river, and the region, will hand us (Please support us here). And to you—our readers, our fellow travelers on this river—thank you. Without you, we’d just be shouting into the void.
This article appears in October 2025.
