9,000 Stories – A Holiday Letter from the Publisher

A letter from MyRye.com Publisher Jay Sears

We wish all of our readers a happy holiday and successful 2024.

This year held many milestones but perhaps the most important is the daily work – the community event, the council meeting or the sports score that brings out our shared sense of community in MyRye.com’s local reporting.

Facebook and Google are still eating the world – and that includes capturing ad dollars from local media. We have had local advertisers tell us they are redirecting dollars to Google and Facebook. Financial firms are rolling up and gutting newsrooms. The pandemic was another slap in the face, driving more newsroom layoffs. Increasingly, communities are in news deserts – places with no credible sources of local news.

If you appreciate our work, please subscribe to our daily newsletter (via our newsletter sign up on the right side of our website). If you run an important business in or around Rye or know someone who does, we need additional advertising support. 

Like what we do? Don’t like it? Think we should expand our coverage in a certain area? Want to share your view on an issue impacting the City of Rye? Get in touch and introduce yourself.

Many, many people – public officials, local business owners, nonprofit leaders, school officials, teachers and coaches, city employees and many residents – call and email and share information and opinion with us. We thank each of you for your time and your good intentions in making our City and community better.

Our 2023 milestones include:

• Multiple stories on the new tree ordinance and the ethics imbroglio engulfing the Rye City Council, the Nursery Field turf wars and our Giving Rye series highlighting over thirty local nonprofits that do important work in and around the City (this series will finish on Christmas day);
• Our reporting in the first days of 2023 forced the Mayor to acknowledge the City’s $3.25 million settlement from a sex abuse case in the Rye Fire Department.
• Following the legal battles between the Wainwright House and its Milton Point neighbors.
• Over 300 sports stories covering girls and boys varsity sports including our State Championship Girls Soccer and Boys Football teams.
• Former Rye City Court Judge Joe Latwin started the Holding Court series on Tuesdays to share his hallmark humor and legal insights. Steve “the OG” Feeney continued his Garnet football game previews.
• We continue to voice dissatisfaction with the reduced transparency from the Rye Police Department on its incident reporting (what readers know as the blotter) but acknowledge its policy to announce all major arrests. Let’s keep pushing for greater transparency.
• We hosted over a dozen college and high school (from Rye High School and Rye Country Day School) interns who applied writing, editing and photography skills to learn about community news operations and the current state of local news. If you know a college or high school student interested in our 2024 internship programs, tell them to get in touch.
• Our audience has continued to expand post-COVID to over 17,000 users each month.
• This month we surpassed our 9,000th story about the City of Rye.

You often don’t realize what has been accomplished when you are in the thick of it. Certainly we have forgotten some of our highs and lows in the blur of the holiday rush.

Over the next few days you will read interviews from some of our 2023 spring and summer interns about their experience working in community news here at MyRye.com. We look forward to building our community together in 2024.

Happy holidays,

Jay