We’re now well into the second half of the Gazette’s first year as a community-owned nonprofit digital newspaper and, as usual, your donations and advertisements are needed to make ends meet.
Advertisers have begun to notice as we’ve expanded coverage over the last eight months, increasing readership from barely over 500 people each week, to over 1,200 now. Our Facebook posts have sometimes reached well over 5,000 views, peaking at 12,000 when we reported on a shooting and offered flood coverage noting road closures.
Front Seat Coffee now regularly takes out a front page ad. Those among the burgeoning Hardwick restaurant scene have been taking note.
We need more than ads and donations though, we need your contributions of time. Time not only for both news and event coverage, but time to join our board and guide the 135 year-old Gazette into its next era. Our biggest current needs are for a treasurer, grant support and helping us stay in touch with readers and donors.
In addition to new board members, we can’t be everywhere and, with limited staff, we are always making choices about what to cover.
It’s clear there’s lots more in the 11 towns we cover that isn’t being reported on by the Gazette, or other print, digital and broadcast media.
We need community members in each of our communities to let us know when newsworthy events happen, we need photographs of those events, we need community organizations to let us know when they will be putting on events and we need people who were at those events to write stories about them.
The community journalists working with us now are a big help in the towns where they live. We will be happy to have others join them where we don’t yet have people covering town events.
We look forward to a time when we’ll have one or more local correspondents in each of the towns we cover, looking out for the important news residents won’t get on social media, Front Porch Forum or statewide media.
This endeavor only works with your involvement. To that end, our board is working on a plan to hold gatherings over a spaghetti or chili supper in each of our towns, inviting those with government, community and business connections for a conversation about what value the Gazette can bring to the town, what we’re doing right, what we’re doing wrong and how to expand important local news and events coverage.
We hope you will join those gatherings when you hear about them.
And, lastly, you can hear me most Thursday mornings at 8:30 a.m. on WDEV Radio’s Morning News Service, 96.1 FM, 550 AM or online at wdevradio.com, where I talk with Joel Najman, or another of the hosts about that week’s Gazette stories.
Paul Fixx, editor
Paul Fixx is editor of The Hardwick Gazette and lives in Hardwick.
