The Croton Chronicle celebrates 200 posts in just over ten months! Next goal: 1000 subscribers by our one-year anniversary.

We know we cheated a little, but you get the point.

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We know what you are thinking: Didn’t we post this post because we were at 199 posts and we knew if we posted this post we would reach 200?

We confess. Yes, we did. But to be fair, in a matter of hours we would have reached 200 posts anyway, so why prolong the joy. We’ve been serving the Croton community for more than ten months now, with news, features, profiles, commentaries, Guest Editorials, announcements, photos, and other items you will not find anywhere else.

We know that not everyone in Croton loves the Chronicle. We often publish news that some in the village would rather not read about, even if it is true, but that other villagers do want to read about, even though they might wish it were not true. Sometimes, that’s what freedom of the press is all about.

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear,” George Orwell once wrote (fun fact: In a planned preface on freedom of the press for “Animal Farm” that was not actually published at the time, and only discovered many years later.)

We know that many Crotonites are reading the Chronicle, because most of our posts generate at least 1000 views, and some go as high as 2000 or more (the record holder is more than 3000 views, for an article about a very disturbing event in the village that we will pass on discussing here.) That is a very significant readership in a village of our relatively small size.

From the steady growth of subscribers to the Chronicle over the past ten months, we think we are doing something right, and so we plan to keep on doing it.

Last month, we set a goal for our one year anniversary on October 29 of 1000 total subscribers, free and paid. We don’t know if we will make it, but with your help, we are going to try. We are at 880 as of this publication.

(And we promise this will the last pitch for subscribers until we make it.)

So here are a bunch of buttons you can use to help make it happen. If you are a free subscriber, please consider taking out a paid sub, starting at just $5/month (remember, 200 posts in ten months is an average of about 20 posts per month, which means that each story costs only 25 cents if we are doing our math right.)

Free or paid, you can help spread the word, and you can give gift subs and get rewarded for doing so. Please help keep freedom of the (local) press alive, here in Croton. Click on the button(s) of your choice right now.