Who's behind this, who pays for it, and what we promise you — in plain English
That's the whole origin story. No business plan, no investors — just a guy with kids, a free weekend, and the realization that finding something to do around here took forty-five minutes of detective work. One park district calendar. Then the other one. Then every library's page. Then three Facebook groups. By the time you'd checked it all, the kids had turned on the TV.
So he made a list. For himself. Then it got away from him.
Hand-collected events so a dad would know where to take his kids Saturday. Purely selfish.
Every parent in the county was doing the same detective work. The list became a public events page.
Checking a website every morning is work. So it started sending a daily digest — first to one inbox, then to anyone who asked.
Where do we eat after? Which park has the good playground? Who do I call about the furnace? Every question became another directory.
A daily newsletter, an events map for 27 towns, a dozen directories, local news — all from a guy who just wanted to take his kids somewhere.
Most local sites eventually get big enough to be worth something, somebody offers them money, and the thing quietly stops being for you. We'd rather write these down now, in public, while nobody's offering us anything — so you can hold us to them later.
Not from businesses, not from candidates, not from anybody. No one has ever paid to be on this site, and no one ever will.
No banners, no pop-ups, no "sponsored" listings wearing a costume. If a restaurant is at the top of a list, it's because of the list — not because of a check.
No premium tier, no featured placement. The 30-year diner and the brand-new taco truck get the same treatment.
We don't endorse, we don't campaign, and we don't quietly help our friends. We're not anybody's megaphone.
No favors for people we like. No punishment for people we don't. Nobody gets buried and nobody gets boosted.
No accounts, no tracking you around the internet, no selling your inbox to a data broker. You show up, you find what you need, you leave.
These aren't "for now" promises. No plan to monetize later, no ads down the road, no exit strategy. This was never built to be sold — it was built because a dad couldn't find a list.
Why it matters: when nobody's paying, nobody's owed. No advertiser to keep happy, no sponsor whose bad review we'd soften, no donor whose meeting we'd cover gently. We can be straight with you because nobody has bought the right to be otherwise.
Our readers disagree with each other about nearly everything — and still coach the same Little League teams and show up to the same pancake breakfast. We'd like to keep it that way.
So here's the standard: we report what was said, what was voted, and what was decided. If a board voted 5–2, we say 5–2. If it's on the agenda but hasn't been voted on, we say it's on the agenda — not that it passed. If a document says something, we link the document so you can read it yourself.
Can we be perfectly unbiased? No — nobody can, and we're suspicious of anyone who claims otherwise. What to cover, what to leave out, which sentence goes first: all judgment calls, made by someone who lives here and has opinions like everybody else. What we can do is watch for it and fix it when we get it wrong.
1. If something we published looks biased, unfair, or flat-out wrong, tell us. No press credential or polite tone required — "this is wrong and here's why" works fine.
2. We'll actually look. Not defensively. If you're right, you're right.
3. If we blew it, we fix it fast and say we fixed it. No quiet edits pretending it never happened. Admitting a mistake costs us nothing but pride, and pride isn't on the list of things we're protecting here.
4. If we look and still think we got it right, we'll tell you that too — and why. You're free to keep disagreeing.
We'd rather be corrected a hundred times than be wrong once in public and leave it standing. If the community can't trust this, it isn't worth running.
And nothing about how the site gets built is a secret either. Our sources, our methods, the automation behind the newsletter, and exactly who the bylines are — Dale, Rae, and Mack — are all laid out plainly on the About & FAQ page.
A dad's Saturday problem that turned into a county's homepage. Free forever, funded by nobody, owed to no one.