From the publisher

To the West Carleton Online reader,

Hello West Carleton. I’m Jake Davies, the publisher of West Carleton Online. I just wanted to remind everyone our free trial ends Friday, Aug. 3.

I sincerely hope you have been enjoying the news service West Carleton Online provides, I’ve had an incredible time delivering it.

I started this project in December, 2017 when I first learned the West Carleton Review would be closing early in 2018. As a boy who grew up in Kinburn and has spent eight total years as the former community paper’s reporter, photographer and editor I knew as soon as the news broke, community news would be sadly missed in West Carleton.

The idea that was just a seed in January has grown and morphed many times in to what you see now. My hope is West Carleton Online will continue to grow and change and continue to build each day and each year. But like any business we need the support of our community.

It is absolutely true to say we wouldn’t be where we are today (July 30, my 47th birthday) without the support West Carleton Online has received so far. As the seed was gestating in February, the West Carleton community was mobilizing. A community meeting was held Feb. 12 to discuss what they should do without a newspaper.

That’s where I first met Walter Veenstra, Andy Rapoch and Judi Varga-Toth. Ken Holmes was also there, a community champion who I previously interviewed when with the West Carleton Review. These four were the first to support this project and have volunteered their time, knowledge and experience countless times over the last half year. They continue to do so dedicated to the success of West Carleton Online.

We wouldn’t be here without the early subscribers. Those brave 50 or so subscribers who signed up site unseen to take a chance their investment would eventually turn in to the return of community journalism in West Carleton. Several of those early subscribers were family members, friends, friends of my parents and parents of my friends all who call West Carleton home. But even more subscribers were people I did not know, and I don’t think knew me. They put their faith in a person they did not know in hope for the return of stories about their community.

Following West Carleton Online’s launch July 3, the support continued to grow, and again it is with thanks to the community. Thanks to the local businesses that bought advertising right out of the gate. Your ads provided West Carleton Online with funds to keep us on our feet and focused on providing good, local coverage. But it also provides legitimacy to us a media source. You are showing trust in us as a reliable, fair and honest media outlet by attaching your name to ours.

We also thank the community that has, maybe not signed up yet, but visits us and reads us and raises awareness about us. We thank our social media community that likes and comments and shares and everyone in West Carleton who greets me so warmly at community events across West Carleton and thanks West Carleton Online for bringing the news back.

West Carleton Online’s subscription base continues to grow, but we are a long way from being a sustainable, growth-focused media outlet.

While West Carleton Online is a subscriber-based business, we absolutely need the support of the business community. Not necessarily as advertisers (although we would never say no), but as subscribers. Many of our services are directed at you and reliant on you. As a subscriber, a business has free access to our Business Directory where they can post their service, advertise their product and link our website to theirs. Our Events Calendar is free for any subscriber to post their upcoming event. Subscribers can easily share our events calendar with their Google Calendar, Apple iCal or other compatible, cloud-based personal calendar. The strength of our business directory and events listings is directly linked to those who post on it. The more businesses in our listing, the more often it will be a destination for your potential local customers to come and find you. The more events posted, the more often visitors will come to us to see what’s going on in their community.

For the nearly 10,000 households in West Carleton, we hope you will become subscribers as well. We are the only media outlet dedicated to West Carleton. We post new stories every day and we deliver them right to you through your computer, smartphone, tablet and email.

I thank everyone who took the time to visit West Carleton Online over the last month and truly hope you will continue to subscribe to the only news service dedicated to the community of West Carleton.

Sincerely,

West Carleton Online publisher, Jake Davies.