I have big news to share with you.
The Chicago Community Trust has announced it's awarding me $35,000 to fund improvements and new development to Windy Citizen. The trust also announced awards around that same amount to 11 other Chicago-based news organizations and non-profits including Gapers Block, the Beachwood
Reporter, the Chicago News Cooperative and more.
I'm not yet ready to announce exactly how we're going to use the funding, but expect news on that front soon. Our goals as always are to do a better job helping Chicagoans find the best stuff in the city today.
In the meantime, I want to thank the Chicago Community Trust for having the courage to hand out this funding to startups and new initiatives instead of holding on to it for in house efforts. The funding was originally awarded to them to start a new local news organization in Chicago. I'd heard rumors about this and didn't think it was a great idea. In August, when they announced they'd decided to change tacks and give the money away, Knight News Challenge-style, my respect for them shot up quite a bit. New ideas need support to make an impact. It's great to see one of Chicago's most respected institutions siding with the upstarts.
And I want to thank every Windy Citizen for your support over the last year. Every vote, every submission, every comment has been a great encouragement to me, our interns, our bloggers, and everyone pulling for us. It wasn't so long ago that I was asking you to chip in as a micropatron to help keep the site up for a few more months. Those days are behind us for the most part. Now it's time to focus on taking Windy Citizen from 100,000 unique visitors per month and 3000ish users to 4-500,000 visitors/month and 15,000 users. We'll get there folks. We'll get there.
Thanks for your support of Windy Citizen.
We've got a thread going on the awards over here. Please stop by and
help us aggregate any coverage of the announcement and discuss the other winners. There are definitely a few worth scrutinizing.
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BradFlora
Brad Flora is founder of WindyCitizen.com, a web service that lets people share their favorite Chicago news and events with their friends and neighbors. More
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