Southington Outsider Marks 1st Anniversary

No news organization devoted specifically to Southington, and limited coverage from area news outlets – that was the situation Jill and I encountered when we moved back to our hometown of Southington in 2024, and that’s the situation we decided to fix last year, in 2025.

Today marks the first anniversary of the launch of The Southington Outsider news site. We began quietly enough: our first article, which was designed to test how well our website worked, was a zucchini recipe. Not surprisingly, it only found a handful of readers. Since then we have published over 300 pieces on all sorts of topics, with many getting more than a thousand reads. So far our most popular article was coverage of the 2025 local election results, which had 6,500 readers; but a piece last fall on the new private high school coming to town, and a recent article on the new senior dismissal policy at SHS, were also right up there. Most of our readers come to the site from Facebook, but more and more people are reaching us directly.

We donate our own time and some funds to keep this site going, but by no means are we doing it all alone. The five other members of our Board of Directors have brought sage advice, tips, help, and guidance. Our freelance writers and photographers and social media managers have brought their talent and passion. Goldline Bookkeeping makes sure we keep good track of all our revenue and payments. Beyond that, hundreds of people from the community have reached out with helpful suggestions, tips, donations, and short thank you-notes that make all of this worthwhile and, so far, sustainable.

Our main goal with this site is to make it possible for you to see and read about things going on in town – especially things that are hard to access or easy to overlook. We try to verify that what you’re reading is accurate, and, if there is any question about its accuracy, to at least let you know the source. Polls show that people across the country generally distrust ‘the media,’ and a big reason for that is that they can’t see who is providing the information or assess their motivations. We want to earn our readers’ trust by making these matters more clear.

Our status as a nonprofit news site means that political independence is built into our organization. By law we cannot endorse candidates for office or promote legislation. Consistent with that, we always aim to give both sides in any debate a fair hearing.

Another advantage that a mom-and-pop operation like ours has over larger news organizations is that we are accessible. You can always reach out to us at editor@southingtonoutsider.org, and we will try to get back to you as soon as we can.

Being a nonprofit makes us dependent on fundraising. The money to compensate our freelancers and pay for our technology comes from business sponsorships, individual donations, and grants. If you don’t yet subscribe to our newsletter, you may not know that we recently won a grant from the Community Foundation of Greater New Britain that will allow us to rebuild our website in WordPress with better design and functionality, and what we hope will be a much more useful community event calendar. We’ve been meeting with a professional design studio for the past few weeks, and hope to have the new website up and running by the time school starts again.

Grants are great for special purposes. But only local donations and sponsorships can provide the kind of steady support we need to continue doing what we do and expand our coverage of things like sports and local organizations for years to come. That’s why we regularly ask people to donate to us – just like I’m doing now. However you help out, we are grateful to have your support, and glad to be doing this important work.

Sincerely,

Philip Thibodeau