The Mainstreeter and The Ottawan team up to launch The Sidestreeter

Our new weekly digital publication will provide online readers with a wealth of neighbourhood news, features and events from across eight of Ottawa’s urban core communities.

MAINSTREETER STAFF

       As the centrepiece of its Year of Community Engagement, The Mainstreeter is proud to announce a brand new sister digital publication – The Sidestreeter – which we expect to become the “go to” platform for hyper-local, community-centric event information and news for online readers residing in Ottawa’s “core urban” communities.

   “In a year when  The Mainstreeter  is working hard to engage in community-building and collaboration, we are thrilled to be welcoming a new member to our family – The Sidestreeter  – which is our most productive joint effort ever,” said Dianne Wing, chairperson of  The Mainstreeter ’s Board of Directors. “This announcement is the culmination of months of hard work with our new digital partners, The Ottawan, which publishes one of Ottawa’s foremost digital newsletters!”

     The Sidestreeter, which will be published weekly on Thursdays and delivered free of charge to subscribers’ inboxes, is now in advanced conceptual design stage.  The first edition is expected to hit urban Ottawa’s ozone by the target launch date of February 19th, according to sources at The Mainstreeter, who see the new online publication filling a void in the current local information landscape.

   “Individual community papers do a fine job of informing their own communities about goings-on within their boundaries,” observed Wing. “But currently, there is no publication that provides a hyper-local focus on the multiple communities and neighbourhoods that form the populous urban core of Ottawa. That’s where The Sidestreeter  wants to play,” she explained.

     According to Lorne Abugov, Editor of The Mainstreeter, the new publication will let a reader in Vanier know what’s going on in Centretown, or a reader in Little Italy know what’s happening on the weekend in Old Ottawa South.

   “Certainly, we know that our readers living in Old Ottawa East crave news and information that The Mainstreeter provides on our own community’s side streets. But the daily lives of our readers take them to all corners of Ottawa’s urban core, for work, for shopping, for leisure activities, you name it, and The Sidestreeter  can keep readers current on comings and goings within the core in a handy, well-curated weekly read,” Abugov said.

   Subscribers to The Sidestreeter can expect to get a heavy dose of just about everything taking place in and around the urban Ottawa communities of Old Ottawa East, Old Ottawa South, the Glebe, Centretown, Alta Vista, Vanier, Little Italy and Lowertown.

   The bold new red masthead of The Sidestreeter borrows from the classic look of The Mainstreeter, employs a stylized “S” festooned with Canada’s flag atop the Peace Tower, and adds the explanatory tagline: “Covering the news and events in Ottawa’s core communities.”

   The genesis of The Sidestreeter  is twofold, according to Abugov. “The Mainstreeter had been exploring a digital transition for almost a decade, but our limited human resources always seemed to thwart our plans to create an online presence that published more frequently than every two months,” he explained.   

   “The need to create a new digital sister publication to The Mainstreeter was heightened when we explored our readership data during the development of our recent Strategic Plan.”

    The second driver of the new collaboration was the idea voiced by Peter Croal, a member of The Mainstreeter‘s board, who suggested that it might be worthwhile to connect with the folks behind The Ottawan. Croal was a subscriber of The Ottawan and enjoyed the information content of the daily “drop” in his inbox.

  Meetings then ensued, and the two organizations seemed to “click,” pooling their strengths and sharing a common vision of what a new, hyper-local urban core e-newsletter could offer online subscribers.

   “We’ve been working hard behind the scenes with Martha and Darren at The Ottawan, and we think we have come up with a win-win publication in The Sidestreeter that is going to increase community-building and engagement of readers within the urban core,” Abugov concluded.

   In collaborating on The Sidestreeter, The Mainstreeter hopes to combine its news and features reporting experience with the curation and events focus of The Ottawan, which already boasts a growing subscriber base and a strong digital design flair.

  “The Sidestreeter  will provide a much larger digital footprint for The Mainstreeter content we develop and also provide more exposure for Old Ottawa East events, organizations and businesses,” Wing said.

     “Moreover, The Sidestreeter  can offer the very same benefits to other community print newspapers within Ottawa’s urban core who want to connect and bring their content to new readers outside of their community boundaries,”

Wing added. “We think this can be a big boost for community newspaper readers in the urban core who might not previously have had the chance to read about restaurant openings in Little Italy, or local personalities and organizations in Sandy Hill, or events coming up in Alta Vista.”

   While he welcomed the addition of The Sidestreeter to The Mainstreeter family, Abugov also offered reassurances that the printed paper version of the community newspaper remained his team’s top priority. “That’s job #1 for us, and it will always be, I expect. Our print newspaper has never been more important to, and valued by, this community than it is today.”

   If The Sidestreeter sounds like it might interest you, paste this link into your web browser: https://mainstreeter.ca/subscribe-to-the-mainstreeter-newsletter/ or scan the QR Code below to subscribe and check it out. It’s free of charge.