A screen shot shows results from the News Poll about bike lanes on West 35th Street.

I'm super-excited to see all the engagement and new membership coming to the McKinley Park News, and the related activity tied to our news poll about Bike Lanes on West 35th Street .

Welcome and thank you! We really appreciate you signing up for membership (and subscriptions) and joining our community of the McKinley Park neighborhood's residents, enterprises, institutions, friends and fans. 

Because of our micro-local scale, I'm able to take a moment to look over and welcome every new member as all of you register: See the "New" ticker at the top of the page, which scrolls the day's updates.

Real people comprise our member community: We have a zero-tolerance policy for spammers, bots and AI agents, and work to ensure our online community is an authentic, local, convivial, inclusive space by humans, for humans.

In addition to News Polls, our members can participate here in our Forums , customize member profiles and comment on news articles. We're one of the only news outlets that still supports community features, and it's fantastic and exciting to see usage, with engagement from all types of people who have varying opinions on all kinds of things (such as bike lanes). 

I really appreciate everyone sharing themselves here and the trust you place in our news publication. I look to our publication's practices, policies, persistence and independence as key elements that earn this trust.

For example, our foundational mandate of a chain of trust running through all operations informs our pro-user privacy standards and practices , such as denying consumer surveillance integration and dark design practices like advertorial .

Acting in your interest applies to platform,too: Our polling tech runs internally within the McKinley Park News:  We don't use an outside service like Google or Facebook, which then scrapes your answers for its profit.

I regularly turn down money offered by those who want to spy on you by integrating third-party ads and scripts, and from marketers who offer to pay to have their messages presented as editorial news coverage. We've also severed services from hostile entities like Google that profit from secret and unregulated surveillance of you.

I'm proud to say we've never broken the chain of trust we promised, and this is part of the reason why you and others can participate in our polls and community confident that we are here for you. Unlike most other news outlets these days, you and other readers are our primary customers: not targets lured in to be exploited.

These are the things that I think are making us successful, both as a local news publication and as a trusted asset for our community. We're climbing to over 1,000 registered members (and our email newsletter subscribers are way past that), and nearly a half-million unique visitors per month, with tens of thousands and more coming from Chicago IP addresses.

I again thank all our new members and our entire member community for being part of the McKinley Park News, participating in our features like polls and comments, and sharing yourself with us and our audience. We're going to continue to look for ways you can interact and engage directly with our local news.