By David Gordon, CVPost Board chair
It’s four years today (Feb. 2) since the CVPost website first appeared online.
That, like today, was Groundhog Day and we joked that if we saw our shadows before the launch, we’d hold off for six weeks. But, shadows or not, we decided to go public that day.
So, happy anniversary to us. But what has been accomplished in those four years? And what’s next?
We’ve made major strides toward establishing our identity as a news platform focused to a considerable degree on the Chippewa Valley’s nonprofit organizations. But we’ve fallen short on one important aspect of that goal.
Most of our coverage has been focused on Eau Claire County, and we have provided less reporting than we would like on nonprofits in Chippewa and Dunn Counties.
That’s something we’d like to remedy as we move forward. You can also expect to see continuing reviews of music events, which we initiated because there are somewhere between few and none in other Chippewa Valley media.
We’re hoping to revive the “6 of Substance” series that provided information about a different Chippewa Valley nonprofit each week. In 2017, we featured a total of 27 organizations in this series, until the intern who was coordinating it moved on and the information stopped coming in.
We will also continue to publish material from the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism that has local relevance or which deals with broader topics that likely will interest our audience. Our Board is discussing a couple of other ideas to expand and diversify our coverage. And we will try out ways to make our website more visually interesting, such as the slider we’re now using to display our top stories.
“Community supported journalism”?
When we first launched the CVPost, we referred to it rather hopefully as “community supported journalism” and that phrase remains in the logo at the top of this column. The hope was that the community would support our efforts in two ways – financially, and by providing written material for us to publish.
To date, the results have been mixed on both counts. We have some committed supporters whose membership contributions have provided funds for such basic expenses as website hosting costs, workers compensation insurance and website maintenance.
We’ve also had some excellent contributions of opinion and analysis articles from members of our audience, on topics ranging from allowing anyone to buy into the Medicare system to net neutrality to whether the UW-Eau Claire police acted in a racist manner in a particular situation. (There always, of course, is room for more such articles.)
What we haven’t had is support from community volunteers who are willing to spend some time and effort reporting regularly on an organization or an aspect of community life that particularly interests them. Nor have we had financial support from many people who find our website worth visiting.
Additional support of either or both types would enable us to expand the scope of our coverage and provide you with a more interesting and informative website. Please think about how you might help us do that in our fifth year online.
In the meantime, happy Groundhog Day to all. . . especially if we can avoid another six weeks of this crazy winter.