Windy Citizen Shutting Down

By Chuck Sudo in News on Jun 18, 2012 3:40PM

It hasn't been a good weekend for local online media outlets. On Friday, the A.V. Club Chicago announced it was bidding Our Town adieu. Today it's Windy Citizen that's calling it a day.

Windy Citizen founder Brad Flora explained the move in a post. The main reason being money, of course. But there were other reasons.

"(F)rankly, the internet is a lot different today than it was just over 4 years ago when I started Windy Citizen as a place to find and share local news. Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, Everyblock, these sites do a great job of keeping people up to date on what's happening in the communities they care about. Reddit's city subreddits like r/Chicago were very small 4 years ago but now are healthy discussion forums with lots of helpful information."

Windy Citizen showed much promise when it launched in 2008 as a local competitor to Reddit as both a news aggregator and a hyperlocal news source. But Flora also noted in the post that he and the WC's other moderators never could get a handle on spammers proliferating the forums and performance issues that would cripple the servers at the most inopportune moments.

Flora said he would offer a post-mortem on what he learned from managing Windy Citizen in the near future.