Five years of The E’ville Eye. Please Help Sustain Local News for our Community

Here we are. Five years of The E’ville Eye. After being a victim of gun violence in my neighborhood in 2010, I decided to take matters into my own hands by spotlighting crime happening in our city. In July of 2011, we published our first blog post. I soon realized the abysmal news coverage within our town and slowly branched out to local government, business, history, development, culture and other relevant topics. Along the way we recruited new voices and developed a platform to communicate with our city leaders and advocate for residents. We’ve made an impact, but feel there’s much more to do. I feel we’ve stepped it up for the community … and now we’re asking the community to step it up for us.

Make no mistake, we are completely independent. There is no news bureau, there are no angel investors, there is no trust fund. We are a scrappy team of citizen journalists and concerned neighbors doing our best to cover our dynamic but somehow overlooked area. Our fragile existence is being held together by selling T-shirts, a handful of advertisers and less than a hundred regular donators giving anywhere from $1 a month to a few hundred a year.

Now I face my biggest personal challenge to keeping this going for the community: Parenthood. My personal time (and pocketbook!) has taken a huge hit and I fear that are days are numbered. Our biggest challenge remains convincing people to chip-in for a product that can be consumed for free. At the risk of sounding like a KQED pledge drive, we need you. If even a fraction of our regular readers chipped in, I think we could sustain this for the community. If not, local news in Emeryville might not be viable. I hope you value the service we strive to bring you by taking the time to make a recurring or one time contribution of whatever you can spare.

Thank you for reading The E’ville Eye and engaging in our community,

-Rob Arias
Founder/Editor