It has been six months since CHS was regularly posting daily news. After a break, we are back.

Some things have not changed. CHS returns with the same basic model of what we hope is excellent reporting from a small core team and a wide ranging army of regular — and irregular — contributors, usually pretty swell writing, great photography, and a focus on high-level journalism at the neighborhood level. We won’t pretend to get “all sides” in any story — but I guarantee we will give humanity a fair shake.

Some things have changed. For a decade, CHS survived as a business thanks mostly to advertisements purchased by local merchants, restaurants, and community organizations and programs. We will continue to offer the service, though you will probably notice fewer ads on the site.

To continue into a new decade, CHS must now more fully turn to its readers for support. A trio of dedicated journalists are in place at our core — longtime CHS contributor photographer Alex Garland, CHS newbie and respected Seattle reporter Kelsey Hamlin, and me, a community news publisher character played by Justin Carder :).

Now comes the pitch. We will not (yet) be building a subscription wall like the New York Times or the Seattle Times. It’s just not practical at this point for us from the technology end of things and the last thing we want is for the site to be slowed.

But CHS will also no longer be free — exactly.

To succeed, we believe CHS needs to have at least 2,000 subscribers paying to help support the site.

SUBSCRIBE TO CHS

We’re asking you to subscribe TODAY and pay what you can. It is not a model you see a lot in the neighborhood news biz. But we hope you will agree there aren’t a lot of neighborhood news sites like CHS out there.

SUBSCRIBE TO CHS

Some 8,000 or so people come to read the site on any given day — more than 100,000 in the course of any month. We will keep everybody up to date on our progress and plan to make a big push these first few weeks to get the ball rolling. You can help spread the word, too.

Questions, comments, concerns? Let’s talk in the comments.

THANKS FOR READING,

Justin