The Weekly View celebrated its 15th “birthday” on March 13. Our first issue was published on Friday, March 13, 2009. We’ve had a fantastic decade and a half! We estimate that we’ve published 740 issues, which is over 5,925 pages of entertainment, news, and more (this number doesn’t include special supplements like our “Its My Business” tab or our yearly Irvington Halloween Festival guide).
We started out as four women who knew that the greater eastside needed a newspaper to tell its positive stories and highlight its businesses. Starting a newspaper from scratch isn’t easy (if it was, everyone would do it). Within two weeks, our office was burglarized and our computers stolen and damaged, setting us back a few weeks. We discovered that delivering papers in so many zip codes required a lot more labor than we thought. We were on a pretty steep learning curve from the beginning, and something is always coming up that we didn’t foresee.
During the last 15 years, some things have changed. We changed the name of the paper to the Weekly View from the Eastside Voice. (The business name remains Eastside Voice Community News Media, Inc.) One of the founders left. We lost two beloved columnists, Rose Mary Clark and Steve Nicewanger — and we still feel the loss of those two wonderful people. (Their work is still up on our Web site, weeklyview.net, if you’d like to revisit their words.) We survived the COVID pandemic, but some of our local businesses (and advertisers) could not. The last four years have tested our creativity and gumption in ways we could have never predicted, but we’re still here, publishing and working hard to maintain a quality publication every week.
We remain grateful for our contributors Al Hunter, C.J. Woods, Steve Barnett, and Linda Kennett, who provide us with their valuable talents. Writing consistently for a weekly publication is much harder than you think, and we appreciate the time and energy they put into their contributions.
As an advertiser-supported paper, we need to thank the many businesses and nonprofits that buy space in our paper. They have believed in us from the beginning and we believe in them! Shop local!
All of this would be a pointless exercise without our thousands of readers who continue to pick up the paper or have it delivered to their homes. I always get a little thrill of pride when I see someone in a restaurant or library reading our paper. I know all of our hard work is appreciated by many of you.
Thank you all from the bottom of our hearts!