Over the weekend we published stories that resonated with our readers—the apparently permanent closing of a favorite restaurant in the East Cobb area, and the story of a local couple being detained by immigration authorities after living here for many years.

We saw it not only in the traffic numbers, but in the conversations they generated, and we’ll be following up both stories as more developments arise in both of them.

It’s what we do at East Cobb News—provide you with local news that matters, that goes deeper into this community than any other information source. We’d like your financial support to help us do that, and you can click below to do that here.

Please contribute today!

It’s what we’ve based our editorial and business models around, and they do go hand-in-hand. East Cobb News is a reader-focused, community-driven news, information and local business promotion source, first and foremost.

We make this resource free to all readers because we want local news to be accessible to all. As we’ve told you before, local news is bearing the brunt of what’s happening in the changing media landscape, and most outlets have decided to lock down that access to their readers.

There’s nothing more frustrating that logging into a news website that already throws up a paywall—urging you to “unlock” their precious content—then being subject to automatic videos and other intrusive messages before you get to read a story.

Or even more maddening, they make you keep logging in every few days, despite having an active account that’s paid-up.

The truth is that most traditional news outlets—newspapers, magazines and television and radio stations—treat their online operations as afterthoughts. I know this from experience, and when I set out to create East Cobb News, I was adamant about changing this.

It wasn’t going to be the newspaper or radio station online, but the community news source that put the community first.

For nearly eight years now, we’ve worked hard to live up to that promise, and sought feedback—good, bad or otherwise—from readers about how to make East Cobb News better.

In recent months, I’ve been asking readers for voluntary financial contributions, and many of you have responded so generously.

I thank all of you who have, and I’d like to ask those of you who have not to consider making a donation. Click the button below to provide your support.

Become a regular supporter!

I don’t want to charge for access to East Cobb News, and I know this can be annoying to keep reading these solicitations for donations.

I’d rather not write them at all, but frankly, if we don’t get more reader support, East Cobb News may be putting up a paywall.

I don’t want to do that, but we’ve got to generate more reader revenue to keep giving you the local news that you love.

I don’t know what a pay model for East Cobb News would look like, but we have only a few dozen financial supporters right now.

Yet our audience is healthy: More than 9,000 newsletter subscribers, nearly 20,000 combined on our social media channel, and thousands more who find us via search engines.

Our readership is growing, and our ability to cover more news, upgrade our technology and support our expanded business challenges is growing too.

Local business advertising accounts for most of our revenue, but many independent local news outlets like ours also ask readers for their support. Businesses of all kinds need multiple revenue streams to stay afloat and grow, and we’re not any different.

While we don’t have the overhead costs like legacy outlets, we do have things we need to pay for and invest in to make East Cobb News sustainable in the long run.

We are reader-focused at the heart of it all, and so we need readers to step up and contribute.

What you get is unlike anything else in this community—daily news as it happens—without being charged for it. There’s no paywall, and we want to keep it that way because our mission includes making local news accessible to all.

If this really matters to you, we’d like for you to become a regular supporter of our community-driven approach to local news.

If you could take just a moment to set up a recurring donation on our payment system linked just below—we’re suggesting $6 a month, but it can be any amount you like, monthly, annually or one-time—we would appreciate it very much!

Help keep East Cobb News free—please donate today!

 

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