As we wind down 2023 and get ready to welcome a new year, we wanted to take a moment to pause and say we might be reaching the end of the Hyattsville Wire — or it may be a new beginning.
Earlier this year, we marked our 11th anniversary of covering life on the Route 1 corridor. We ran the numbers and that equates to us publishing a story about the area once every other day for more than a decade, making us the longest continuously running online lifestyle news source for the area.
But to continue our coverage, we need more support from the community. We just can’t keep going as we have.
The Hyattsville Wire started as a small community blog back in the spring of 2012, but we have grown exponentially into a major news source for the Route 1 corridor and surrounding areas, helping local businesses, startups, artists and authors, and community groups get the word out.
We’ve made such an impression on the area that the Wire is even featured in the 8-foot-by-20-foot mural by local artist Curtis Woody that hangs in the new Hyattsville public library, as shown in the photo above.
The corridor has changed a lot in over a decade since we started the Wire and we’ve been right there alongside it, sharing everything you need to know — from restaurant openings to new housing and shops to highlighting local artists and business owners, along with new library openings. We’ve even helped share untold stories of the fascinating history of the area.
When we initially started the Wire in 2012, we chose not to add a paywall. We wanted everyone in the community to be able to read our stories, and we wanted other news outlets in the greater D.C. area to read our coverage too, and write their own versions, helping give a news voice to an area that has been underrepresented in the D.C. media.
Our work has been an incredible success. We are now at 2.8 million page views, with more than 19,000 followers on Threads, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter with a large email subscribers list. And this winter will be our seventh year running the Best of Route 1 reader survey to help showcase your favorite people and spots on the corridor.
Local businesses tell us that they get a flood of customers after we write about them. We’ve boosted a number of GoFundMe initiatives for local charities and struggling businesses. And we’ve become a recognized news source for the D.C. area, having been featured everywhere from Greater Greater Washington, Eater DC, and UrbanTurf, to DCist, the Washington Post and Politico. We literally wrote the Washingtonian guide to the area that hit newsstands just before the pandemic.
Several readers from outside the area have even written in saying they wish there was a hyperlocal news site like the Wire covering their neighborhood as we tirelessly write about the Route 1 corridor.
But all this growth has led to a bandwidth we can no longer sustain without more community support. Among other things, the increase in traffic and popularity has led to internal challenges that need revamping, including rebuilding our website in order accommodate all this growth now and in the future and updating our community-supported events calendar, among other new features.
Local news matters, but it’s harder than ever to find. Hyperlocal news is even more rare.
A recent report found that 2.5 local newspapers are shuttering each week — a rate that’s accelerating — for a total of 2,900 lost since 2005. More than half of U.S. counties have no local news source or just one remaining outlet.
We don’t want the Hyattsville Wire to join that list, so we are launching an end-of-year fundraiser to help us make some upgrades and give us a boost to keep going strong.
Here are seven ways you can help support us:
3-Advertise your local business
5-Follow us and share our stories on Threads, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter
From scratch, we’ve handmade the Hyattsville Wire 1.0 that you’ve grown to love. Now we need to create a version 2.0 of the site to match our current status as an official news source for the area.
Thanks for your support and look forward to continuing our coverage of life on the Route 1 corridor and beyond.
