The Story Behind the Windy Citizen

Hi and welcome to the official Windy Citizen blog, where Kayla, myself and other members of the Windy community will post announcements, news and and some fun stuff along the way. 

For this first post, allow me to fill in some backstory.

The Windy Citizen is the culmination of a series of online journalism projects I've worked on since 2006. I came to Chicago in the fall of that year to study at Northwestern's journalism school and was soon cranking out stories on the arts and culture beat in Hyde Park.
Frustrated that there was no way to publish these pieces where they could get some eyeballs, I started a simple wordpress blog over at MethodsReporter.com (site now redirects to here).

For the next year and a half, as I explored Chicago and got to know the city better, I published my own Chicago journalism on the Methods Reporter and would team up with colleagues to tackle bigger pieces from time to time. Highlights include

• Coverage of the 2006 PS3 release
• the first photo tour of 826CHI in Wicker Park
• a look at the Kwik-E-Mart themed 7-Eleven
• the mother of all productions, our wall-to-wall coverage of the 2008 Chiditarod, which you should definitely watch.

During this time, I came up against two problems, one as a local publisher and another as a guy trying to make the most of living in a great city like Chicago:

1. There's no easy way to put good local stuff in front of a lot of people. 
   If you start a blog about national politics, there's infrastructure you can plug into that will ensure you get readers if you put out a good product. If you write about the CTA or city hall, you're screwed. You might score an isolated bump from a TV or newspaper mention, but there's no tool to regularly deliver readers to your stuff if it's good and interesting. 
2. There's no easy, data-rich way to find the best stuff in the city.
   Every day Chicago gives birth to thousands of stories, listings, forum posts, photos, video, sports scores, crime data etc., etc., and for years we've only had a few ways to filter it. You can ask your friends for recomendations or see what the newspaper says. In both cases, you're getting your data from a very small, very biased pool of sources. As someone who was relatively new to Chicago, I wanted to eat at the best places, attend the most interesting events and read and discuss only the news that really mattered, and I wanted to draw upon a large and deep pool of sources for this information.

What I wanted, I eventually decided, was a simple list of links to good local stuff, assembled, not by a single person, or even a group of people, but by the collective action of anyone who decides to drop by and weigh in on the matter.  I wanted a crowd-powered front page for Chicago that would send me elsewhere, not lock me in to any one place or service.

A site like this, essentially a local, social news site focused on Chicago, could give me an at-a-glance look at what's news, what's hot and what's interesting in Chicago and could also introduce people to sites off the beaten path, rewarding people who decide to take up the challenge of writing about their communities instead of launching another yet another presidential politics blog.

So upon finishing school, as my friends left Chicago to take
internships and some truly killer gigs, I turned down two job offers, moved into the cheapest apartment I could find off of Craigslist and started work.

And so in April of 2008, Kayla and I, along with a handful of other volunteer editors, contributors and bloggers launched The Windy Citizen.

We've spent the last few months gathering up local experts and personalities to steer our blog network, and meeting with local publishers to learn more about what they do.  Every meeting confirmed the need for a service that would point people to interesting local stuff.

And so I give you the new Windy Citizen, a crowd-powered front page for Chicago that generates a simple list of links to the best stuff in the city, backed by a blog network. We want to let you choose what's news, send people to cool new local stuff and make your life a lot simpler by giving you just the highlights from across Chicago.

How you can get involved

If this story resonates with you, if this project is something that piques your curiosity:

• sign up and start posting stories
• browser the leaderboard and friend people who like what you like
• check out and vote up the best submissions waiting in Upcoming
• pitch us a new blog idea you'd like to run with. 
• And invite your friends, family and anyone you know who migh t be interested in the task at hand.

Feel free to e-mail Kayla and I at any time at windycitizen at gmail.com

Let's get this thing going.

-Brad

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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