A Proposal for a Neighborhood Publication

At the center of Chicago rests the McKinley Park neighborhood, filled with city bustle, quiet streets and a diverse mix of residents and businesses. It's one of the oldest settled areas in the region, rich with historic sites and the crumbling edifices of Chicago's swaggering industrial past. In so many ways, McKinley Park is a fantastic place to live: centrally located with great transportation, lower crime than all adjacent neighborhoods, affordable housing, comfortable density, a fantastic and huge park, and a growing cadre of civically active residents doing their part to improve the neighborhood and city.

However, McKinley Park has suffered an information deficit: a lack of good coverage of the people, events and news that both connect neighbors and provide context for a neighborhood. Neither the Brighton Park Life nor the Bridgeport News cover our neighborhood comprehensively, and both seem to be suffering through problems common to old-guard neighborhood newspapers. Reporters for the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times will only be dispatched from their hollowed-out newsrooms for a dead body or other gory neighborhood spectacle. Although reporting from new media publications like DNAInfo is very welcome and provides original content at high editorial quality, their resources are spread too thin to provide regular detail and depth. Automated content aggregators like EveryBlock spew data without curation, hoping for users to volunteer their participation and content. News monster Facebook supports many McKinley Park-specific channels, but each is siloed in either its own enclave or as an announcement channel for a specific organization's activities.

The contemporary version of the McKinleyPark.org website kicked off in 2012 as a response to both holes in neighborhood news coverage and as a platform to support McKinley Park's residents, organizations and institutions. Its core feature was (and remains) a community events calendar that seeks to publish and highlight as many neighborhood events as possible, displaying the full range of activities that our neighborhood offers. This earlier version of the website included membership and online community features, and one of its envisioned potential destinies was getting handed off to a local organization that would continue the site's neighborhood-specific focus (with assistance from the original developer as desired). To date, no suitable or interested organization has been discovered.

The McKinleyPark.org website went offline in 2014: initially to conduct upgrades, then due to unexpected personal circumstances of the publisher. When it relaunched this past spring, it presented a number of new features, including multilingual versions of the site and support for mobile devices via responsive web design. The site also began to publish original content much more frequently and to regularly spread word about it via a number of communications channels.

On the back end, new features included further optimizations and more specifically implemented website analytics that provided information about website traffic and audience. This data yielded valuable insight into both needed improvements and whether website traffic would support a revenue stream, even a modest one to partially offset publishing and production costs. In other words, might a hyper-local online news publication be worth implementing for our McKinley Park neighborhood? For this publisher, the answer is yes.

This fall, the McKinleyPark.org website will be making a number of fundamental changes related to transitioning to a publishing entity, including changing our brand and top-level domain name, since a “dot org” domain implies a non-profit website. All primary content and most existing features will be retained, and new features will be added. Our publishing schedule will be enhanced, and neighborhood coverage further improved; all publishing activities will continue to be executed at the highest levels of editorial integrity. Qualified advertisers will have an opportunity to participate in a beta sponsorship program while qualified neighborhood non-profits and community organizations will receive – if they desire – complimentary access and features to help support their activities and missions. These changes will be announced in advance both on the McKinleyPark.org website and via current and new communications channels.

Once the change occurs, the McKinleyPark.org domain will initially redirect visitors to the new website domain. However, the offer is still open to employ McKinleyPark.org toward a purpose that benefits the McKinley Park neighborhood. If desired, this offer includes the best-in-class web technology that runs the website and assistance from its current developer. Potential uses could include a site for an existing or new organization that focuses on the McKinley Park neighborhood, online features that inspire better networking and community, bases of information to spur economic development, a website training ground for local kids and educators, or any other number of ideas specifically relating to our McKinley Park neighborhood.

All feedback on these changes is most welcome, including the pending metamorphosis into a publishing entity, what to do with the McKinleyPark.org domain, and contacts from any interested advertisers or community organizations who wish to start getting patched into the new website. Please send email to website@mckinleypark.org to provide this or any other feedback and ask any questions.

Publishing the McKinleyPark.org website has been a true pleasure and has hopefully benefited our neighborhood's residents and organizations: The next phase of this effort should offer even more for McKinley Park, with the new structure and focus enabling continued operation and growth.

Thank you for your continued interest and support.

– Justin Kerr, Publisher