Hello Forest Parkers,
Among your reasons to be proud to call Forest Park home, let us add another:
Our Forest Park Review just brought home the Kramer Trophy as the top small weekly paper in Illinois. So says the Illinois Press Association.
Small but mighty, we say.
The Review won a dozen honors last week in Peoria. Everything from General Excellence to news reporting, beat reporting, features, pictures, columns, special section.
What did we cover to win so many awards? All the local stuff. The ins and outs of local zoning. How Forest Park keeps getting bluer in national elections. The Casket Races. Our obit on Dave Novak, the long-time parks director. And we took first and second place for our columnists Tom Holmes and the now retired John Rice.
Lots of people made this happen. First among them is Jessica Mordacq, our lead reporter at the Review. Week in and week out, Jess is there to cover the hard issues and the softer stories that give this town its heart.
We don’t do this hard work to win awards. We do it for our readers. But when it happens it feels good.
Maybe you know, maybe you don’t, but five years ago the Review, and its three sibling publications in Growing Community Media, became a nonprofit. That means we now proudly rely on our readers to help fund our scrappy newsroom.
This is a better moment than most to make the ask.
If what you know about our village comes significantly from reading the Review online, we need you to become a member of this hometown club. That’s our future. That’s how local news will continue, maybe thrive a little, going forward.
Best case scenario for us is for you to sign on as a monthly donor. Ten dollars a month would be great. Helps us build a strong foundation and make our plans. You’ll hardly miss $10 but your local news will keep on coming.
That’s the ask. Now’s the moment.
And we’re Max Reinsdorf, interim executive director; Jess Mordacq, reporter; Stacy Coleman, digital manager; Javier Govea, edit design manager; Susan McKelvey, designer of the Review; Jill Wagner, circulation and knower of Forest Park; and Dan Haley, senior advisor.