Dear Reader

Dear Reader,

Maura and I are on the road this week and are finding ourselves with unexpected intermittent internet access. Consequently we bring you an abridged version of the Indy this week. But we’ll be back next week with a full edition and will get you caught up on anything that we have missed, including reports from last week’s meeting the Community Safety and Social Justice Committee.

Readership Is Up
Indy readership continues to increase after hitting a three year low back in June. We’re now averaging about 31,000 page views/month, not quite our high of 40,000 that we hit the month before the November 2021 elections but we’re getting there. We now have 2180 subscribers who receive the Indy every Saturday at 6 a.m. via email., though the majority of our readers still access the Indy by visiting our website at www.amherstindy.org. You too can save yourself a few keystrokes and receive the Indy weekly by signing up for a free subscription here. We promise that we will not share your email address with anyone else and we will not fill up your inbox with junk – we’ll just send you once/week a summary of Indy headlines and links to the articles..

Busiest Day
The Indy “officially” comes out with a new issue each Saturday and we have also been posting new content on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Saturday is our busiest day of the week – we get about 20% of our page views on that day. The next busiest day is Friday where we are seeing increasing traffic in the late afternoon and early evening as folks tune in early to catch new content as it is posted for the Saturday edition. Our next busiest day of the week is Wednesday, and we tend to see the least traffic on Thursdays. You can find summaries of our readership statistics in our table of contents (What’s In This Issue?) along with a listing of the most-read articles from the previous week.

Will You Help Us Report The News?
The Indy is an all volunteer community journalism project. We bring you comprehensive reporting on happenings in Amherst, often reporting that you can’t find elsewhere, because your friends and neighbors have volunteered to attend events and meetings and share what they learned with you. There is so much happening in our town right now that it is getting hard to keep up and we’re looking for some additional folks to join us and help us keep our coverage broad. Work typically involves attending one or two meetings/month and then writing up a summary of what transpired. Never done anything like this before? No worries – we’ll help you get started. Drop us a note at amherstindy@gmail.com and we’ll talk.

We’re especially looking for people to help us cover the following beats:

Agriculture Commission and local farming news
Conservation Commission
Community Resources Committee
Energy and Climate Action Committee
Finance Committee
Solid Waste and Recycling News
School Committee
Transportation Advisory Committee

Thanks for reading the Indy and best wishes,

Art

Art Keene
Managing Editor