Why The Parks Outlook?

(editorial by the Outlook’s Dave Schmidt)

Nearly four years ago my wife and I moved to Machesney Park after living for over 30 years in NW Ohio. That is when I started an online newspaper for my hometown in Ohio and thus the Mercer County Outlook was born. The Outlook would allow me to keep up with all of the happenings from all of the people I knew and had worked with. The process was very slow, getting readership was quite tough since I lived here in Illinois. But since that time (nearly 4 years ago) we have now had some real success with the readership. The reason it works so well is because of the readers and those in the community. A small community seems to support efforts like this wonderfully and if you have a chance you can visit the Outlook in Ohio ( www.mercercountyoutlook.com ) and see how it looks. A funny story, I last visited my old community in September of 2007 and was pleasantly surprised to hear folks say how much they enjoyed the Outlook and read it loyally. The funny part was that most of them said we enjoy the Outlook but we haven’t seen you around town much, where have you been? With a laugh and a smile I say I live in Illinois, they didn’t even know I had moved! We do find that many of our readers of the MC Outlook also do not live in the area but enjoy keeping up on the old hometown.

So why now the The Parks Outlook? Several of my new found friends in the Parks area said they enjoyed reading the Ohio Outlook and said why don’t you do an online paper for us? So that is the main reason I have decided to produce The Parks Outlook. I hope to give folks in the Parks area a way to read news that is locally based and interests them. This means I need you to make it work by emailing us your pictures and stories of local interest. This includes civic groups, churches, little league, fund raisers, etc. We want to provide you with information you might not see in any other local media coverage and sending us information is easy to do. Does it work, yep, but we need all of you to help. The great part about the Outlook is that it is free and you can read it whenever you want. We are asking local government departments to send us news releases and will ask them for statements once in awhile, we post what they send us and do not editorialize there statements on our front page.

So now we ask you to be patient with us as we develop The Parks Outlook, sometimes it takes time to make relationships in an area. We do ask you to help us by you telling your friends about us and we encourage you to send us information, does not need to be “hard” news but something others might be interested in knowing about.

Thanks for stopping by and we would appreciate your input on the Outlook, so please email us at – daveschmidt@bright.net