The prototype for The Austin Chronicle and the first issue of AC

This ain't no party

This ain't no disco

This ain't no fooling around

This ain't no Mudd Club

Or CBGBs

I ain't got time for that now.

– "Life During Wartime," The Talking Heads

Welcome to AC.

When The Austin Chronicle was begun, in a huge, un-air-conditioned warehouse space above a dry cleaner and the old Half Price Books location on 16th Street, we lived the lifestyle we wrote about. The office looked like the set for a particularly ill-conceived version of a Beckett play, and we often didn't leave it for days at a time. When we did, we ate together, watched movies, went to clubs, and stayed up all night talking and listening to records.

No one owned a house; few of us could even afford junker cars. We were the children of Marx and Coca-Cola, in search of love, rock & roll, and adventure. The Austin Chronicle reflected this.

Times have changed. Most of us own homes, many are married, and more than a few are parents. I've loved the way the Chronicle has changed and matured. But the real energy of the street, which used to be our main drug of choice, has been missing. The paper isn't immediate enough; it lacks the taste of dawn after staying up all night dancing, the smell of gasoline staining your fingers as you haphazardly fill the tank, a week into no sleep.

We decided to leave the Chronicle alone, but to start a new, weekly publication, distributed on Fridays, that would be driven by younger staff. A publication hip and of the street, happening, and about tomorrow as much as today. In other words, AC.

I've always been up-front with our readers, and certainly money is, as always, an issue. The at-first dramatically abrupt, and now depressingly steady, decline in revenue demanded a rethinking. Especially evident was advertising lost because of our graying demographic.

These were considerations that gave us pause. We realized we need to raise a new generation of Chronicle readers and initiate several generations of new Chronicle advertisers into the advantages of spending their marketing money with this organization.

But AC is more about the smell of freedom than that of dollars.

What you hold in your hands is the beginning of a new Austin adventure. As I mentioned above, by now quite a few of us are parents, with many of our children half grown, and it's time there was a local paper that speaks to and for them. There shouldn't be much impact on our weekly edition; it will be the same Chronicle you've always read. We will have to economize, but just a bit. Other than losing three or four pages of news coverage each week, though, the Chronicle will not undergo any major changes: Most record reviews, and all book reviews, in the weekly will remain almost exactly the same (and some of the excised material will still be published, but online only). These cutbacks should be temporary, lasting only as long as it takes to get AC established and the books just a bit better balanced. Budget woes are the worst – and with this, our new publication, we're saying, "Oh Bondage, Up Yours!!" to them.

Welcome to our future. May it be a great trip together.