Labor Day in Flint marked one year since Flint. Daily. officially launched. I wanted to take a few minutes, up front, to acknowledge how grateful I am for the positive response we’ve had, starting from nothing, in a short amount of time. I am constantly dissatisfied with myself and am fueled in part by a massive inferiority complex about my work never being good enough (I blame my mom for making me wash every dish in our cupboards after she caught me cutting corners washing the four or five dirty dishes in the sink to get my allowance money quicker). But the many people who have reached out and supported the work we’re trying to do here has helped me overcome my own self-doubt and has made me excited to build even more in the next year.
A few things I’m proud of with this spare-time venture of mine:
- We have published 324 stories in the past year. Not quite the “one story daily” ambitious goal that I set out for, but pretty dang close for a small group of people doing this out of passion in our spare time.
- We have almost hit 500 email subscribers (and please tell your friends to sign up if they haven’t, we only send one newsletter per week and one fundraising email per year, we don’t spam your inbox with asks).
- We have nearly 4,000 combined followers on our social media platforms, without ever running a single ad or doing a sponsored post on any platform. Not that we’re against paying to boost posts. We just don’t really have any money. And I won’t lie … it does feel kinda good to say we’ve never paid Meta anything.
- More than 30 individuals made donations to help us expand our coverage. And stay tuned: those donations will result in a few new writers and bylines here in the coming weeks.
In short, there’s always room to grow, we’re committed to seeing where things take us and where we can expand, we’re ambitious and not looking to just be a hobbyist news outlet forever, and the response so far has only further cemented our goals with this thing. We have a much clearer direction than we did a year ago at this time, and that is solely because of the collective responses to our work by our readers. We take this seriously, we want to do it at a high level, and we don’t really know what to say right now except for thank you.
I also wanted to take a moment and point out a few immediate changes on the horizon.
New Artwork
I love newspapers and grew up professionally in the newspaper business before doing like a thousand other jobs over the last 20 years. Some of my first real memories as a kid revolve around reading the Detroit Free Press sports section every day.
But let’s be honest … newspapers can also be stodgy, late-to-change institutions. There have been lots of ways journalism and news have sucked the creativity out of what is actually a very creative process. This includes efforts to take stylistic elements out of writing all the way to never changing up a publication’s branding or masthead.
We plan to change our look up every year, and we want to do it artistically. My son Oliver is our de facto art director. He’s 16, takes it seriously, and wants to pursue it in college. I adored the brightness of his Miami Vice-colored Flint skyline/weatherball look we used the past year. But we’re changing it up.
His new design features a similarly colorful take on another Flint icon, Atwood Stadium. His youthful memories there include watching high-level Flint City Bucks soccer games there with our close friends over the past seven years. Mine date back to watching Mark Ingram Jr. begin his run all the way to the Heisman Trophy at Atwood, or Flint Northern’s Thomas ‘The Train’ Rawls truck over people like … well … a train.
The main reason I love incorporating his work into the site is simple: it is Flint through the eyes of a kid who has grown up here and loves it here. That’s reflected in the bright, vibrant way he portrays it. That’s exactly what we hope to do with our writing and news coverage here, too. We don’t shy away from the very real challenges, but we also want to shout from the rooftops the reasons we love Flint and stay here.
(And also I like that if anyone complains about the logo I can say, ‘Wow why are you bullying a teenager?’).
A New Partnership
Many of you read our Flint primary election coverage we did in partnership with East Village Magazine. We are excited to announce that partnership is deepening, although we don’t exactly know what that looks like yet. For now, think of us as “sister publications.” We’ll both operate as our own distinctive platforms but also work together to share resources in a variety of ways. For readers, the most noticeable element you’ll see soon are likely bylines from Flint. Daily. writers in East Village and vice versa. We’re operating in a news environment where no publication truly has the resources to do it all, so finding creative ways to maximize our news output is vital. I’m excited to see where this goes over the next year.
A Font Change
This many not be a major difference, but it is in line with our greater philosophy of making our news coverage as accessible as possible. You’ll see larger font sizes throughout our site. That is based on Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) recommendations for font sizes on screens. We were previously at a 12-point font. Now, our content is at 14- or 16-point to make it easier to read for people with visual impairments.
We are in the process of diving through our photo archive to make sure all of our images have better alt text for anyone who uses screen readers. We also are working on expanding our Spanish Language section on the site.
Essentially, we want to reach as many readers as we can in the city, so any changes we can implement to ensure more people can access our coverage, we are open to doing it.
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