East Kootenay News Online Weekly (e-know.ca) has been live for three months now.

We are happy and proud to report that we are getting considerably more views than we believed was possible in the first few months, having grown from 4,800 views in our first month, to 6,800 views in the second month to more than 10,000 in our third.

And interest continues to grow as more and more people around the region come to the understanding that there is an alternative media source serving their communities.

This growing an online newspaper thing is totally alien to us.

I’m an old ink-stained wretch, after all. My medium for 20 years was newsprint and newspapers. So the learning curve has been so steep that I sometimes feel like one of those chalk-fingered, ropeless, freestyle climbers clambering spider-like up and over faces so steep that they’re tilting toward the ground.

Perhaps the thing we are finding the most gratifying to our efforts thus far is the eager willingness people have to checking out a new product like ours.

Research prior to launching our paper, and anecdotal awareness from two decades in the newspaper business, told us that there will be a continual climb in interest as time goes on, with the natural changes in the population. In a decade you will be hard pressed to find ‘paper’ newspapers. But we didn’t know how many people in this region would be desirous of checking out ‘a weekly newspaper that is a daily’ because of the immediate nature of the Internet.

It just goes to show how cosmopolitan and technologically sophisticated our mountain/country population has become.

As we march forward with e-KNOW, we will continue to improve. The information stream we wish to wade in is wide and moves fast and we are few. But we want to create a product that speaks to and serves every community in the East Kootenay.

Before we launched this paper, our experiences in this region told us quite clearly that the three main sectors of the East Kootenay – the Elk Valley, Central Sub-Region (Cranbrook and Kimberley) and the Columbia Valley – are all intricately linked through economy and family. They are also remarkably similar in the challenges they face and the futures they see (or don’t see) coming.

Having gotten our feet wet in all the communities, we now know that is completely true.

So we thank you all for your interest thus far and we hope to continue to capture your attention and participation. Our Writers’ Village (the Views section) is enjoying pretty decent participation thus far, with writers and photographers from all over the region taking part. As we continue to grow and mature, that section of e-KNOW will continue to evolve and because there are so many talented and interesting writers in this region, we are extremely excited about the Writers’ Village’s prospects.

Please continue to submit your community group/club/event media releases, because such items make the core of any community newspaper. We are also getting solid responses from the arts and entertainment world in our region.

Happily we can report that we are starting to get steady advertising interest, now that we are getting numbers of visits to a realm that makes it worthwhile for advertisers. Best of all, we expect to double our hits per month by our sixth month in operation, which will essentially place e-KNOW on par for ‘eyes looking at it’ with the rest of the established corporate newspapers in the region.

In addition, more people are becoming aware of our free classified, including the off-shore cyber-trolls who are trying to force their wares into our site. Thus far, we are keeping them at bay but the odd one still sneaks through. Oh the things to learn.

Finally, we wish to thank our regular contributors for their valuable and important submissions.

Cheers. Here’s to our first three months in business.

Ian and Carrie, e-KNOW

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