Want to get your hands on some of The Sprawl's new election zines to pass around? Fill out this request form!

Lately people keep asking me: Which candidate should I vote for?

It's a good question! But The Sprawl is not here to tell you what to do. Our job is to give Calgarians the best possible information to make up their own minds on October 20 (or earlier, if you're voting in the advance vote).

To that end, in partnership with the Calgary Public Library, we're rolling out a series of new zines that will soon be in libraries across the city.

Here's how it works: We took The Sprawl's online candidate tracker—which Kelsea Arnett and I have been steadily updating since November—and made a series of print zines, one for each of Calgary's 14 wards.

After nominations closed at noon on Monday, making the list of candidates final, I buckled down to work with The Sprawl's designer, Chris Pecora. There were some late nights involved and some last-minute chasing down of candidates, but we got it done!

Now Calgarians can have, in a tidy little package, information about all of the councillor candidates in their ward. We also made a mayoral zine too—so 15 in all, each one illustrated by Sam Hester.

This, my friends, is a labour of local love!

Now—here is where you come in. These will be going into libraries. We'll also be taking them to candidate forums (more on that in a moment), as they're a handy guide for who's who. But we're wondering if our readers would also be interested in putting these into more Calgarians' hands.

We think the answer is probably yes. But rather than getting a bunch printed of all 14 wards without knowing the demand for each, we want to gauge interest so we have a sense of how many we might print.

Maybe you want to pass them around at work or school. Or maybe you want to share them around your neighbourhood. A Sprawl "paper route" of sorts!

If you're interested, fill out this form.

Our zines might serve another unforseen purpose. The Canada Post strike, which started Thursday, means a bunch of voter information cards from Elections Calgary are stuck in the mail. These are important because they tell you where your voting station is.

But! One can also check online. And because our zines have a QR code that goes to our full candidate tracker, we have added a link at the top of that page so that people can find out, quickly and easily, where they need to go to vote.

Meanwhile, while I was proofreading zines this week, our new correspondent was settling in and editing video of candidate forums.

I'm thrilled that Asad Chishti has joined Team Sprawl for the election! Asad is a roving journalist who has reported in Whitehorse, Yellowknife, and more recently the Waterloo region for CBC and others. He's also a poet and an archivist. Oh, and Asad has biked across Canada—twice.

We have a lot of mutuals in the letterpress world and have been talking for months about working together. And now, here in the thick of it, we are!

Asad is taking the candidate forums we've livestreamed on YouTube and is making shorter videos so you can quickly see, for example, what Ward 7 candidates have to say about improving transit or what Ward 6 candidates think about blanket rezoning. (Make sure you subscribe to our YouTube channel if you haven't already.)

In addition to cutting video and helping me livestream forums, Asad will be roving around town gathering other election stories. Say hi to Asad at asad@sprawlcalgary.com.

One last bit of news. We're close to reaching our September fundraising goal of 80 new monthly members. I checked the numbers this morning and we are at 62. We need just 18 more!

If you value the work that The Sprawl is doing to keep Calgarians informed during this election campaign, please sign up as a member! It only takes a minute and you can give monthly, yearly or one time as you prefer.

Here's why people are donating, in their own words:

If you agree, sign up today! We'd love to have you on board. Thanks for reading and don't forget to support our independent journalism if you value it!

Jeremy Klaszus is founder and editor of The Sprawl.