Steve Hanson
There are still lots of things going on. I've closed the community survey that has been running for a few weeks and am looking over the results, which I will use to help guide the direction of WisCommunity.
I recently received news that we will receive a grant for the Sustainability Audit that has been going on for the past couple of months. The money will be coming through LION Publishers, The Knight Foundation, and the Google News Initiative. This is good news and will help to fund some new things here, including hiring some freelance reporters. Please contact me if you are interested in writing for us.
One of the things I agreed to do in the audit was to consider a re-branding of the site. WisCommunity made sense when the site was intended to be a state-wide discussion platform in its early days, but it has slowly morphed into a news website, and the name no longer fits. There will be a contest to pick a new name - watch this space.
Obituaries are coming soon. I have signed a contract with legacy.com to work with them on obituaries. Many of you have told me over the past few years that you would like to have a local source of obituaries. There are still some issues to work out, but expect to see them here in the next few months. We will also be accepting obituaries on-line that will not only appear here but in the network of legacy.com websites.
Some time in the next few weeks we will be starting to send out an events newsletter on Thursday every week. It will list our featured events for the upcoming week. We're changing to a new email distributor for this - there may be some irregularities for a while.
We are also having discussions about a state-wide syndication of news stories from independent publications. This is just in the early stages but is an exciting opportunity.
There will be a WisCommunity booth at Let's Paint The Town in July. Stop by and let us know what you'd like to see us do.