Westside Review Issue 0 is here!
It's got the fresh new magazine smell and 40 pages of content
As some of you may have heard, the very first issue of the new Westside Review magazine arrived fresh from the printers earlier this week.
We are calling it “Issue 0” because it’s not, technically speaking, a full-fledged issue. It’s more of a proof of concept, something to show folks to give them a taste of what we can do if we have more funding. The issue includes:
A Westside Review Explainer. This is going to be a regular feature going forward - a two-page article explaining certain facet of the city government. For Issue 0, we took a look at what Chicago aldermen do, anyway. The answer isn’t that simple, because some of their powers aren’t really included in the Chicago municipal code.
A profile of activist Mary Gardner, who was appointed to the Chicago Board of Education since that piece was written.
A feature story about the decades-long effort to bring back the Galewood Mont Clare branch library as a full-fledged branch library. We ended up stumbling onto a scoop, so you are going to want to read until the end.
A photo essay of photography of pioneering Chicago area Black photographer Dorrell Creightney (father of Westside Review publisher Vanessa Stokes). As Vanessa wrote in the introductory essay, he captured Black Chicago of 60s and 70s that is often overlooked. (Photo essays are also going to be a regular feature)
Westsider You Need To Know. This is going to be another of our recurring features, a shorter profile of a West Sider who is doing something positive in the community. This particular one covers one Ms. Edie Jacobs, who is helping Austinites find jobs and overcome barriers to getting jobs.
Some sponsored content from artist Alexie Young.
You can read Issue 0 online, but if you want to get the print version, let us know. We printed 200 copies, and we already handed out some of them, but we would like to try to get them out to folks in the community (and outside it). We got some pretty good feedback from the few people who have seen it, but we will let you be the judge of how we did.
For the next few weeks, we will be posting some of the articles from Issue 0 right here on this Substack. We will be putting up links to our social media channels and our official website once we have everything up and running. Also, expect to see some miscellanies new items, updates on our progress and links to some interesting articles we saw around the web and on socials.
We are planning a release party, where we will be handing out issues (we set quite a few copies aside specifically for that purpose). Date, time and location TBD, but we will have the details here on this Substack and our social media channels once everything is nailed down.
So, please subscribe to our Substack and stay tuned!