Wow. How proud are we?
Last weekend, VentnorBlog, the site that brings you the Isle of Wight, won a number of awards (sponsored by Guardian Local) at the Talk About Local event in Leeds – The ‘Best Hyperlocal site in the UK’, ‘Best coverage of a local story’ for our reporting of the Vestas dispute and ‘Best use of audio’ for Mr Caulkhead’s Isle of Wight Colloquialisms.
We couldn’t be prouder.
What makes us most pleased is that the Island community have really got behind VB – both reading it (the numbers keep rising), but importantly with their comments (over 23,000 comments have now been left on VB).
What is Hyperlocal?
If you’re scratching your head on the Hyperlocal part, it’s a term that first rose to the surface about two years ago.
It means — reporting about a local area. We all know about National news, and regional news – well, hyperlocal is at a smaller scale, even down to the focus on one street.
Hard at times
We won’t lie – at certain points we have wondered, ‘why the heck are we doing this?’ Knocking ourselves out everyday, but still scrabbling around every month to get by financially.
The fact is that it’s been our passion to let you know what is going on – revealing stories that, for whatever reason, weren’t being told elsewhere on the Island. We think that the people of the Isle of Wight have a right to know what’s really going on, not just be told about which rubbish bins have caught fire this week, or who was in court for what.
Thanks to you
You’ve supported us with your readership – and seeing more of you reading to the point where tens of thousands of you are reading VB monthly has kept us going. A sincere thanks from us to you for that.
Thanks also to our followers on Facebook and Twitter who sent best wishes last weekend when we first announced the win.
Keeping it going
What we really need now is to make the site commercially viable – so we can continue bringing you independent reporting of news and events. Giving you the most up to date information when the snow is falling and reporting live from the council chamber when important issues are being decided.
We’d like to be able to offer you even more, but, at the moment, we’re at full stretch (slightly beyond, if the truth be told). To do more for you, we need your support.
Can you help?
We know that not everyone has the spare money to send us donations. If you can’t, how about speaking to your friends with businesses about them taking some advertising – we can prove that advertising on VB works.
10% of profits to Island charities
As you know, we’re all about the community, so we’d like to give part of our profits to charity. Shock Horror! Yes, profits, the thing that most companies so jealously guard!
We’re not going to take the obvious choice and just go for the Earl Mountbatten Hospice.
Although we think the Hospice does a fantastic job supporting people at some of the most difficult times of their lives (we’ve written over one hundred articles of support for the Hospice over the years) – because of their success, they do eclipse other charities equally-worthy of support. Charities that do equally good things with the donations that they receive.
We think it’s more fair that the money – 10% of our future trading profits – go to a pool of Island Charities.
Continued growth
As we said before, thanks to all of you who have read VentnorBlog, have commented or supported us in the past four plus years. We really appreciate it.
Here’s to the next five years!
