Ashland Current: The Business Life

Andrew Broman, Tristan Fitzgerald, and I tried something very new and different this past year: we started a business together.  We didn’t talk about it much at all while we were in the research and development phase, but yesterday we announced the formal public website launch of a local independent news and information website.  We are so excited!

The site is Ashland Current and it is up and running after a month of publicly developing and testing site features at http://ashlandcurrent.com.

The Ashland Current received recognition on August 2 in Editor and Publisher, a national newspaper industry magazine and website. The magazine referred online to a report first published in the Ashland Current in July about lenders taking control of American Consolidated Media, a national company with ties to Ashland and the northern Wisconsin and Minnesota region.

Basically, the three of us are ecstatic to be this far along in the process of providing northwestern Wisconsin with quality online news and information, and we are trying our best to provide the community with a much-needed and sought-after resource.

We created the idea for the Ashland Current in the summer of 2009, started an LLC together, drafted an operating agreement, and wrote a business plan. Since then, Tristan built and designed the site, and Andrew and I compiled and posted hundreds of event listings, stories, and multimedia related to the Chequamegon Bay region. In late June the Ashland Current web presence went live for the public.Over the course of the site’s first month, Ashland Current had 2,700 visits, 13,000 page views, and 1,300 unique visitors who each spend six minutes on average perusing the site.

Lots of websites have a lot more hits than we do, but given our fledgling status we are thrilled and see it as a fabulous start to what we believe will be a long and fruitful endeavor.

If you’d like to check out the Ashland Current, please visit http://ashlandcurrent.com, or see http://facebook.com/AshlandCurrent, or http://twitter.com/ashlandcurrent.