Community Journalism

This site exists to provide the members of our community with the tools to publish their own stories. We do not see ourselves as competing with other more traditional, or mainstream, media outlets, but rather complementing their coverage, and providing the full spectrum of stories from our own neighborhoods. In order for this to work, you must participate too! The tools are available here, and they are not overly hard to learn to use. Start small, get practice, and then take on larger projects.

This site primarily covers local and regional news, and other items of public interest, for the areas of the Methow Valley, Okanogan County, North Central Washington, and Eastern Washington. Some state and federal level news and issues may be covered from relevant angles, such as how they affect our local communities and our rural life.

The forum is open for posting by all users. However, currently, article posting on the site is not enabled by default. If you are interested in publishing your own articles here, please ensure that you have registered for an account, and then use the contact form to send a message asking for your account to be upgraded with article posting permissions.

Censorship

We don't like censorship or gate-keeping by those who determine what topics are discussed in our national conversation because they can control what topics CAN be discussed. As a particularly egregious example, the New York Post's mid-October expose on Hunter Biden's emails, and the Joe Biden family corruption, which had any mention of it scrubbed and blocked from Twitter and Facebook, as well as many other media outlets. Such attempts to hide the truth from the American people are abhorrent and we will not participate in such cover-ups. We will try to bring you the truth, to the best of our ability. In situations where the truth isn't clear, we will generally provide the information and allow you to make up your own mind.

This site is unmoderated, and users can post their own speech - subject to a few basic rules, in keeping with the goals and intent of the Administrator. If you are especially sensitive or thin-skinned, this site may not be a good match for you. We reserve the right to manage maintenance tasks - such as spam removal, bot blocking and similar -  in order to keep the site useful and running smoothly.

Privacy

This site strives to protect your online privacy, as much as possible. We don't gather massive stores of data on you and how you live your life. We don't track you wherever you go online.

We don't use Google Ads, or similar publisher ad programs which track users as they browse the internet. This site is currently ad-free, however this may change sometime in the future. Should that happen, we will run our own ad system, and won't hand your personal information over to massive data gathering companies.

You may have noticed that this site doesn't interact with, or use any tools from, any large tech corporations such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. This is intentional, and is done to limit their data-gathering reach and maximize the privacy and choices of our users.