To our subscribers,

I hope you are too busy enjoying Christmas Day to be checking your emails and visiting West Carleton Online.

I want to thank all our subscribers for your continued support. West Carleton Online started up as a bootstrap business a little over a year and a half ago. Its been an incredible ride for me personally. The challenge of starting a business with zero experience running a business, has been one of the most educational and rewarding experiences of my life.

As a journalist I have had the opportunity to work on hundreds of amazing, heartwarming, tragic and joyful stories over the last year, covering a community in a way I have never had the opportunity to do before – as a daily publishing media service. West Carleton Online has brought a brand-new way of covering a small community. We no longer have limits to the amount of space we have available to cover stories. Being able to publish daily means for the first time West Carleton has a media service that can break news; provide incredible depth of coverage; and is accessible to the reader anywhere they are.

This allows us to cover issues with several stories, several points of view and several angles. Issues and subjects such as concrete batching plants, official plans, federal elections, extreme flooding, senior issues, local sports receives continuing coverage. For example, apropos of the season, West Carleton Online was able to publish 24 Christmas related stories in December alone. We covered two parades, two tree lightings, a cookie exchange, breakfast with Santa, caroling, a brand-new Christmas song and some fantastic Christmas-lit houses just to name a few. I can safely say West Carleton has never, ever had that kind of coverage of the holiday season in its history – no community has.

Of course, none of this is possible without our subscribers’ support. While we desperately do need to continue to grow to make West Carleton Online a success, we wouldn’t be where we are without the support we have received from our current subscribers. Thank you. I hope you will continue to be our biggest cheerleaders and marketers. Word of mouth is still the best way to do business, and your help spreading the word is helping make a difference for us. For me, being subscriber-owned (as opposed to advertiser-powered) is one of the things I love most about West Carleton Online. It means we are responsible to you, and we never take that for granted. I hope you get to spend the next week enjoying your family, friends and community and enjoy a true West Carleton Christmas. We too will be taking a break from work. From Christmas to New Year’s Day we will be taking a break from our regular coverage (we will still be available for important breaking news). We look forward to resuming our continuing coverage of West Carleton on Jan. 2, 2020.

Thank you,
West Carleton Online publisher Jake Davies