We’re growing! Thank you, Winchester!

A lit­tle under three years ago, Chuck Witt and I, along with a few friends, launched what was then known as WinCity News & Views as a sort of col­lec­tive blog where we could share our opin­ions, news sto­ries, and oth­er cre­ative endeav­ors with the peo­ple of Clark County and envi­rons. At the time, we were frankly dis­ap­point­ed with the local news­pa­per and thought we might fill a gap.

We soon real­ized that we had set expec­ta­tions too high for the “news” part of the oper­a­tion, see­ing as we were all unpaid vol­un­teers. It’s impos­si­ble to run a good news orga­ni­za­tion with­out paid pro­fes­sion­al jour­nal­ists. At the same time, new man­age­ment at the Winchester Sun put our local paper on an upward tra­jec­to­ry. We decid­ed to reboot, and WinCity Voices was the result.

We began to focus entire­ly on the cre­ative arts of writ­ing in all forms, pho­tog­ra­phy, and oth­er visu­al arts, and in writ­ing fea­tures about the peo­ple, places, hap­pen­ings, and the his­to­ry of our com­mu­ni­ty. We launched an annu­al sto­ry­telling event and then a pod­cast. Earlier this year, we cement­ed our impor­tant role in the com­mu­ni­ty by part­ner­ing with The Winchester Sun in a con­tent-shar­ing agree­ment where­by the paper runs select­ed sto­ries from our pub­li­ca­tion, and we enjoy a rec­i­p­ro­cal right to pub­lish some of their con­tent. In this way, we are work­ing togeth­er to pro­vide more com­pre­hen­sive cov­er­age of our community.

We’ve also beefed up our web host­ing ser­vices in the last year, result­ing in a faster, more reli­able user expe­ri­ence for our read­ers. There is much more we want to do in order to bet­ter serve Clark County, includ­ing more com­mu­ni­ty out­reach and a more vis­i­ble presence.

Recently, we ini­ti­at­ed an orga­ni­za­tion­al change that will help fund, man­age, con­nect, and expand our var­i­ous pur­suits. We orga­nized a new enti­ty, WinCity Media, Inc., and on May 10, we got offi­cial word from the Internal Revenue Service that our new com­pa­ny was approved to oper­ate as a 501(c)(3) non­prof­it organization.

This opens up our orga­ni­za­tion to new rev­enue streams, such as com­mu­ni­ty grants and oth­er fund­ing that is only avail­able to non­prof­its. We are ensur­ing the future via­bil­i­ty of WinCity Voices and our oth­er media pursuits.

We could not have sur­vived this long with­out gen­er­ous finan­cial sup­port from the com­mu­ni­ty. And while we hope our new sta­tus will enable us to estab­lish one or more sta­ble, long-term rev­enue streams, we will con­tin­ue to rely on the gen­eros­i­ty of sup­port­ers in Clark County and envi­rons to help sus­tain our operations. 

Thank you, Winchester, for your sup­port. We are grat­i­fied by the thou­sands of page views we receive each week, the social media sup­port, and, of course, the finan­cial sup­port. Together, we will work to make our com­mu­ni­ty a wel­com­ing, safe, and friend­ly place for every­one to live, work, learn, and play!