Evanston Now Celebrates 10th Anniversary

EVANSTON, IL - Evanston Now, a locally-owned and independent online news outlet covering all trends and topics that matter to city residents, is celebrating its 10th anniversary this week.

Following City Council meetings through a live blog, catching a glimpse of “What’s Happening” in town and being briefed with the 'Mid-day Update' have been some of the favorite features for Evanston residents over the last decade.

The city itself is a hot one for news, and Evanston Now is on top of it all. A daily local crime update, following the changes in city businesses and buildings and charting recent trends have also made the site popular among Evanstonians.

“Evanston has always been an interesting town for news -- a very diverse small city rather than a typical suburb,” said Bill Smith, founder and publisher of Evanston Now. “And as the home base for a major university, it has a lot of people with activist tendencies and strong opinions about a lot of issues. So there's a lot of news here.”

Smith, a native Evanstonian and former college journalism professor, provides an interesting perspective on the news in his home town.

“Since I grew up here, went to Northwestern and then lived in a variety of other places before returning to Evanston 11 years ago, I've got both an insider and an outsider perspective on what goes on here -- which makes it extra interesting to cover,” he said.

Launching in March of 2006, Evanston Now was ahead of the game in providing an online-only news outlet. Patch launched a year-and-a-half later.

It’s another example of Evanston serving as a trendsetter. Not unlike the city’s early adoption of the 311 system (which recently celebrated its 5-year anniversary), becoming among the first in the nation to adopt gender-neutral restroom signage, holding a Citizens Police Academy for residents long before most other cities caught on and raising the legal smoking age from 18 to 21.

In an article marking the anniversary this week, Smith showed the consistent growth of Evanston Now, which started with less than 50,000 views a month and now averages “over 40,000 unique visitors in a typical month and well over 200,000 pages of news each month.”