2019 Changes for West Boca News

Changes are coming to West Boca News. We have been building and growing since roughly 2012. We started with this website then expanded onto Facebook, Twitter, an e-mail list, and most recently we’ve been doing more on Instagram.

Going forward there are two changes for 2019. They won’t affect most of our readers, but they’re big for us.

SUBSCRIPTION CONTENT

We will be offering a subscription option for our followers. If you subscribe, you will get access to premium content. The highlight of this will be the return of detailed local crime reports with analysis. This is something we hope to start soon.

We stopped doing most local crime reporting a couple years ago for a few reasons. Most important for now is the fact that Facebook is anti-free speech and punishes users who post content of various types. Even our recent and less involved local crime reports have been flagged. Facebook specifically points to “judicial proceedings” as a problem. So we’re moving this off Facebook as much as possible.

Subscribers will also get full access to detailed restaurant inspection reports. We will continue some free inspection reporting but it will be limited.

Other content will include videos of incidents, and other things that we have not been publishing because of Facebook restrictions.

We expect the subscriptions to cost $5/month and hope to have this up and running by the end of January. Facebook is offering its own subscription program at $5/month, but we can’t use that because of their restrictions.

ADVERTISING

We are ready to expand our advertising for local businesses. We used to limit ourselves to 15 advertisers which meant one ad post a day. We have been brushing up against that limit for several months.

Going forward we will now accept up to 30 advertisers so our readers may now see two ad posts on some days. To kick this off we are offering a New Year special. If you start in January you’ll only pay $199/month and you’ll lock in that rate through the end of the year. Starting February 1 the rate goes up to $249.

If you’d like to advertise with us, please e-mail [email protected].For those who might complain, please recognize that we put a lot of time into West Boca News and we make very little money at it. As a result we have been inconsistent in our restaurant inspection reports and have limited our efforts in other ways. The subscription model gives us the incentive to do more.