Bluegrass Gives Success Powers Next Chapter for Local Journalism

Thank you, Winchester and Central Kentucky! Tuesday’s Bluegrass Gives fundrais­er was a tremen­dous suc­cess, not only for us but for many oth­er wor­thy non­prof­its in Clark County and the Bluegrass region. We exceed­ed our goal by quite a bit and are ful­ly fund­ed for 2026 and then some. We are over­whelmed with the trust you have shown in us.

You have demon­strat­ed your com­mit­ment to free, local, inde­pen­dent journalism—and now we have the resources we need to go even deep­er in our cov­er­age of Winchester, Clark County, and beyond.

All this has been the icing on the cake of a record-set­ting year for us. We added 12 new con­trib­u­tors to our tal­ent­ed team. As of December 5, we had already sur­passed last year’s page views by over 10,000, with near­ly a month left to go! We added almost 1,000 new Facebook followers.

By any mea­sure, 2025 was a ban­ner year for us, and we plan to keep the momen­tum going!

Now that we know our bud­get, our advi­so­ry board will meet in ear­ly January to set goals for 2026. Some of the things we will con­sid­er include:

• pub­lish­ing a print­ed anthol­o­gy of some of our best con­tent from our first five years of WinCity Voices
• renew­ing our com­mit­ment to our pod­cast, The Voices of Winchester
• employ­ing an expe­ri­enced pro­fes­sion­al jour­nal­ist to do some deep­er dives into analy­sis and inter­pre­ta­tive report­ing, with an empha­sis on local gov­ern­ment and civic engagement
• host­ing one or more com­mu­ni­ty edu­ca­tion pro­grams to fos­ter greater cit­i­zen par­tic­i­pa­tion in local gov­ern­ment and affairs
• step­ping up our social media pres­ence to gain new read­ers and keep our com­mu­ni­ty bet­ter informed
• con­tin­u­ing to grow our audi­ence and our team of cre­ators to reach more under­rep­re­sent­ed communities

To wrap up, let me say that the real stars in all of this are you, our read­ers. You read our sto­ries, you com­ment and share them on social media, you email your friends about our sto­ries, you send us encour­ag­ing mes­sages, you donate mon­ey to sus­tain us—you do all the things that have made our first five years a success.

Our com­mit­ment to you con­tin­ues: to lift the voic­es of the unheard, to tell the sto­ries of the won­der­ful peo­ple, places, and hap­pen­ings in our town, and to pro­vide a place for cre­ators to share their tal­ents in prose, poet­ry, art, and photography.

I can’t wait to see what next year brings!