Greetings, readers, friends and fans of the McKinley Park News!
We hope that you and yours have been enjoying a wonderful start to the holiday season, and that this continues into the new year. We’ve been working like Santa’s elves facing the gift drop deadline in order to build a better neighborhood news publication for you.
You may notice we’ve spiffed up our look with professional-level photography added to the headers of our website pages. Many thanks to Julie Jaidinger Photography, a longtime Gold Sponsor, for her excellent neighborhood photos now illustrating the McKinley Park News.
New Main Menu
Another change you might notice is new structure and interaction for our website’s main menu. For logged-in subscribers looking for our premium content, you can now find Crime Reports, Notable Arrests, Building Permits and Video within subsets of News in the main menu.
Also in our main menu, you may spot the new — and restored — menu links to classified advertising sections: Our classified ads are fully back up and running, and now feature immediate ad purchase and publication, as well as free categories for website members (Free Items and Lost & Found Pets) and neighborhood Institutions (Volunteer Opportunities and Job Training).
Updated Search and Maps
News Search has returned to the main menu, and it’s now powered by an updated process that offers more speed and capabilities. You’ll see new search and filter options in various pages of the website, too.
We’ve made some fundamental changes to the interactive maps you’ll see in the McKinley Park News. We embed third-party services customized for our needs in order to display interactive maps like those you’ll see in our event listings, neighborhood Maps page, classified ads and more.
Google Begone!
We’re now using a service called OpenStreetMap to integrate interactive maps into the McKinley Park News; we had previously been using Google Maps. This change is one element of a now-completed, step-by-step exorcism of Google from our operations and what we serve our users, part of our prioritization of trust in building a news business.
Lastly, we’re moving some of our more processor-intensive features like our full events calendar to be accessible to logged-in members only (including free memberships): Over the years, we’ve listed tens of thousands of neighborhood events, and it takes some oompf from the server to present features like this. But our members are worth it!
Putting Funding to Work
The wonderful funding from our LION Publishers Sustainability Audit is lined up to help our business and platform development, and we’ve pretty much finalized our vendors. Here’s how we’re spending this funding:
- Direct mail marketing to reach out to neighborhood enterprises and sign them onto our sponsorship and advertising services.
- Payment for freelance neighborhood news correspondent reporting, raised to pay rates consistent with Chicago’s writing market.
- Programming to extend the capabilities of our internally served web advertising technology.
- Consulting to finalize and formalize our business plan, and create a pitch package to support business growth.
- A retainer fee for 2024 accounting services from our accountant (if there's any money left).
Our near-term goal is to get back to a full editorial calendar and operations, and this is steadily getting closer. The remaining core website features we have to bring back online are our member forums and updates to our membership and profile system, including a new member subscription package and new tiers for Sponsors.
Thank You!
We will continue to work on this and website editorial work: Our neighborhood events calendars and subscriber features have remained updated will remain updated through the holiday season and beyond.
We certainly do appreciate your patience and continued support while we get everything together. More neighborhood news is lined up for publication soon, and once we’ve hit our stride, we’ll look forward to bringing you an original neighborhood news story every weekday.
We wish you and yours an extremely joyful holiday season. Cheers!
— Justin Kerr, Publisher
McKinley Park News
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