In the air of transparency, the West Chicago Voice website was temporarily down for about an hour today. We apologize for the inconvenience, it’s back up and the issue was fixed.
West Chicago went back to being a news desert for an hour. To be honest, traffic on the site has been incredibly high, a few of the articles we’ve written went viral and the settings on our servers couldn’t handle the high amount of visitors so we needed to expand the servers. In other words, It was necessary for us to upgrade the servers. We guess if the website had to go down, that’s an awesome reason for it to happen, right?
We are so excited and happy you’re all loving what we’re doing. We so much appreciate your support and all the love.
As we move forward, please know we are always seeking volunteers to write/submit news stories, people to attend meetings for us and report back on the happenings, photographers who would like to cover local events- perhaps retired folks who have time to give to a community based organization?
As we continue to grow, we have big plans and hope to grow our employees, at this time we’re a 100% volunteer family run organization. We may even someday, go to a once a week print publication, however we’d prefer for the majority of our content to remain digital because of the ecological impact, and to be honest it keeps our overhead down to be digital.
We too miss print newspapers, and used to enjoy sipping coffee turning the pages of a print newspaper. It’s a sad time but that era is over for the most part.
The evaporation of print news is not without consequences, the ripple effects of losing a local newspaper for a city like West Chicago run deep.
The loss of local newspapers have actually contributed to the polarization and division between people overall. Not having one common voice (see what I did there?! Lol) has really hurt our community. Sure, there is social media and city websites, columns and announcements of social media and that’s great but they’re spread out all over the place and you can often miss announcements because of the algorithms.
We’ve put together a special(and important) page about WHY local journalism matters and how you can support The West Chicago Voice and help us grow, click here to read it:
An Oasis In A News Desert: Why The West Chicago Voice Is Critical To West Chicago
Our office will be closed through Friday as we have some health matters to attend to. We’ll still be publishing, just not as heavy as our normal schedule.
Our best content comes from YOU: email us your news (including birth and engagement and wedding announcements!!) email- WestChicagoVoice@gmail.com or use this handy form.this handy form.
As always, we look forward to your comments, questions and messages. Drop a comment below, we’d love to hear your thoughts on how we’re doing so far!
