WisCommunity participating in LION Publishers Sustainability Audit

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.

Over here at Eye On Dunn County there is a lot to be thankful for. Personally, I am thankful to have a wonderful partner and a whole crew of sweet animals to share my life with. All of them delight and amuse me on a daily basis. 

But on the business end there is a lot to be thankful for as well. I'm thankful for all of you who have chosen to support this endeavor either financially or spiritually. This includes all of the members and donors as well as the organizations that have been helpful to make this website actually profitable for the first time.

We have received many types of support from LION Publishers in the past year. Our benefits always outweigh our dues, but this year we have received a grant from their sustainability audit program, a free Canva subscription for our staff, a Cloudflare business subscription, and much-valued support and advice. 

We have received a free subscription to a partial Associated Press news feed for the election season (thank you AP for your help) as well as access to election results. AP has also just given us a free subscription to the AP Stylebook. 

Our grant through LION was mediated through the Google News Initiative and The Knight Foundation, both of whom I want to personally thank for their support - it has made a big difference to our sustainability, and has allowed me to hire two freelance reporters, for whom I am also thankful. You will see more from them in the coming months, including wider coverage of government meetings and local events.

And yes, you may have noticed that the site was down for a few hours this morning until I noticed all of the text messages I had received while sound asleep. I am thankful for the sleep, but not so much for what in the technical word we refer to as "Faw Down, Go Boom". There seems to be some oddity where once in a while the database server is spinning itself out of control and using all of the memory available after which things get ugly. I am putting Mariadb on a memory diet for the holiday and hope she will stop ballooning up and crowding out everyone else on the server. 

Happy Thanksgiving to you all. I am going to take it a little easy today (this is helped by how many government meetings are canceled this week) and will soon start working on a nice little Thanksgiving dinner with Cynthia, after which we will eat  ourselves into a pleasant stupor. I hope your Thanksgiving is as good as mine.

Steve Hanson
Publisher