Happy New Year And Thank You One And All For Supporting Niagara At Large

By Doug Draper

Hard to believe but more  than a month  has gone by since we launched Niagara At Large and we are already receiving plenty of good vibrations from people across our greater Niagara region – from  both sides of our binational border.

Overlooking the mouth of the Niagara River and the shores of Youngstown, N.Y. fromi Niagara-on-the-Lake. Photo by Doug Draper

A good flow of email and calls of ‘Congratulations’, ‘Wow, what a great idea’,’It’s about time’ and ‘We desperately need alternatives to the old media” has already come pouring in from citizens from both sides of the border, and from some of the people representing us in government, and from business leaders and others who are looking for a new, independent source of news and commentary on matters of interest and concern to our region.

Niagara At Large has also been receiving a growing number of requests from individuals and groups to contribute content to this site. They have offered to contribute even though they know that the only compensation this site can offer to all of us, right up and including this writer and publisher, is the promise of building something that might one day give us back the kind of edgy, vital coverage and commentary our communities need and deserve.

Now that we are in to the New Year, Niagara At Large will be ramping up this site with the goal in 2010 of making it the most vital and go-to site for news and commentary in Niagara and you can click on the ‘keep reading’ tab at the end of this sentence to find out more.

In this New year, Niagara At Large will strive to a larger audience of internet readers, including younger people whose stories and challenges getting a decent education, finding work and simply trying to survive and thrive in our communities hardly ever get the attention they deserve in the mainstream media.

We will be focusing more attention to the challenges our senior citizens face and so many people in between as our region continues to work its way through the worst recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s, and seeks new ways of offering a more promising, prosperous future for each and every one of us who make the communities on both sides of our binational border our home

We will also be taking more advantage of the great capabilities of the WordPress Niagara At Large is being built on by offering audio and video reports, and building special sections of this site (WordPress calls them “Categories” if you look down the right-hand margin of our home page) that will focus on arts and recreation, travel (mostly concentrating on some great ideas for “staycations” in our own region) and sections that will offer citizens across the region to participate in “virtual town hall” discussions and debates on some of the key issues confronting us.

These are just a few of the new features we will be launching as we work toward a lofty goal of transforming Niagara At Large to a regional version of such engaging online sites as The Daily Beast, Voice of San Diego and Huffington Post. In the meantime, click on the tabs above the Niagara At Large masthead on our home page that give you more information on how to be a contributor, our comments policy and what this site’s mission is about.

Thanks once again for all of the encouraging feedback since we began our test launch this December and we look forward to your continued support as we relaunch the site in the first week of January with the aim of taking it to a higher level.