About The Windy Citizen

WindyCitizen.com is a social network for Chicagoans that shows you what's hot in Chicago right now based on the submissions, clicks, votes, and comments of our members.  It gives Chicagoans a free, easy, fun way get local news, find stuff to do in the city and connect with other Chicagoans who like what they like.

Most of our users are people just like you, Chicago people, living in the city, the suburbs, or far abroad, looking for stuff to read at work and events to check out afterward.

Staying on top of the latest news in your city can get tiring after a while, so sign up now to start taking it easy.

What is this place?

The Windy Citizen is the only Chicago news site built by its readers. The Windy Citizen is free. Free to share local news. Free to share local events. Free to share local photos, videos and anything else with a unique web address. If you have Chicago news, share it on the Windy Citizen and show it off to Chicago.

Your submissions go into a pool with everyone else's. Then readers can rate, discuss, e-mail, and click on them, and the links that get the most attention gain "clout" and rise up the front page, creating a constantly-changing list of the 10 stories deemed most interesting by Windy Citizen readers.

So what? There's already a bunch of sites that let me share and rate news.

What's so special about this? Well, yes, The Windy Citizen is a lot like Digg.com and Reddit.com, except it's all about Chicago! While Chicago stuff gets ignored and passed over on those mega-sites in favor of national news and the latest silly videos making the rounds, local stuff finds an audience here.

Allow me to illustrate:

When was the last time you saw a story about David Schwimmer (or the CTA) on Digg? That's what I thought.

So if you're getting tired of seeing the same old stuff float across those sites, come check out the Citizen, where we dig up great local stories all day long.

How does the voting and story ranking work?

The Windy Citizen's front page consists of the most popular posts on the site right now. This "popularity" score is based on how many upvotes a story gets, how many down votes it receives, how many comments people leave on it and how many people read it.

The arrows to the left of stories let users vote a story up or down, depending on how they liked it.

Who Are You?

Brad Flora - Brad is a Chicago-based journalist and web developer. Before the Windy Citizen, he published and edited The Chicago Methods Reporter, a Chicago news site that won no awards, but helped a lot of people get jobs.

Brad lives in Chicago's Old Town Neighborhood with a pair of medical students who share frightening stories with him every evening. He's pretty sure Chicago's the best city in the world.

You can e-mail him at windycitizen @ gmail.com, friend him on the Citizen at http://www.windycitizen.com/user/brad-flora, or follow him on twitter at twitter.com/bradflora.

Feedback, press and general contact

If you need to contact us, send messages to windycitizen at gmail.com

Bloggers, Publishers and Content Partners

Want to incorporate the Citizen into your site? Browse our tools and contact us at windycitizen at gmail.com with questions.