Editor’s Note: The ‘New News Crew’ at Citizen’s Journal is celebrating one year of operations. We salute CJ founder George Miller for bringing to life this cherished and beloved institution which is Citizens Journal. On the anniversary of the sale, he provides this editorial piece. Our goal is to bring unbiased news reporting to Ventura County and Southern California. Although we’ve been dogged by shadow bans and de-listing by big tech, our readership is still strong and the future looks bright. And growth is always possible: Please tell your friends and acquaintances to tune in to and subscribe to Citizens Journal. Apologies for the hyper-dramatic clickbait photo I put up with this article, but the threats to freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, and freedom of redress of government are very real in our nation TODAY. We welcome all viewpoints and actively encourage civil discussion of all policy positions. You are invited to submit your letter to the editor or news tip to [email protected]  Thank you for your readership.Â
CJ Passing of the Torch- Need Help On Next Laps
By George Miller
May 17, 2022
It was a wild ride, but we sold Citizens Journal Ventura County (CJ-VC) after working with a great team to start it up from scratch and run it for eight years. The current owners/managers took over on May 17, 2021- one year ago today. They are local residents and successful business owners, who wanted to help make a difference by offering a “mainstream” media alternative and saw CJ-VC as a way to help in that. I congratulate them on their valiant efforts to cope with the many challenges thrown at them in the last year and to keep publishing, but they need your support to do it at the level they believe is warranted.
CJ-VC continues to attract hundreds of thousands of monthly readers and offers a stark- and for many- welcome contrast to the sometimes mendacious “MainStream” Media narrative. While the majority of CJ-VC content is non-controversial, a number of the opinion articles -and even some of the news articles- are controversial.
Accused by some more radical detractors of publishing “conspiracy theories,” CJ-VC is  increasingly being proven correct- on COVID, election fraud, foreign policy, budget/spending, political scandals, immigration, local affairs and other major issues of the day. As far as opinion articles, they leave it up to the authors- that’s why they are called opinion articles. One year after passing the baton to the new owners, I am more convinced than ever that this publication is badly needed in SoCal, as there is very little regional counterpoint to the near monopoly on the “mainstream” narrative.
During their tenure, they have had to wrestle with the effects of the COVID panic, their major upgrading of the web site technology platform, big-tech “shadow-banning” and significant personnel attrition, attributable to heavy outmigration from CA (the author included), health and financial issues. Eight volunteers left in a year and a half and replacements are arriving too slowly. Also, more funding is needed to improve system performance/functionality, circulation, “hard” news coverage (especially local) and to cover other expenses.
If you want this continued alternative voice in the region, I urge you to support Citizens Journal with advertising, donations and volunteer time- they need help in sales, fundraising, reporting, editorial, circulation and more. There are some paid positions.
You can donate to CJ here. Funds will be used for things such as the website, search engine optimization, services, and certain content.
To advertise or volunteer, or if you have any questions or comments, please contact [email protected].
Story tips and editorial comments to [email protected].
George Miller was the First Publisher of Citizen Journal Ventura County, serving from December 12, 2012 (during planning and startup) to May 17, 2021. He was a former operations management consultant, who also worked in manufacturing operations management and related software/systems. He and his wife Carol (former Assistant Editor) left for Florida in June 2021. He now occupies himself with faith, Carol, boating, exploring and a startup Florida news publication.
I see my comment didn’t even get “approved.”
When they first stopped sending the newsletter out weekly, I suggested to them that they needed to make sure everyone who indicated any interest in the newsletter got a copy each week. It didn’t need a bunch of fancy graphics, a simple text only message would have sufficed. They thanked me for my input and said that was an interesting suggestion. They would look into it.
Now they are in financial difficulty. Whodda thunk? Advertisers have fallen off? Why wouldn’t they stop subscribing? They are not getting the circulation they paid for? Nobody is subscribing to a ghost paper. Why should they? People are accustomed to seeing issues pop up in their in-box. Making them add the url to their bookmarks and going to the bookmark once or twice a week is asking too much of today’s internet geeks. You have to put it in their hands. You can’t make them read it, but without it appearing in their in-box one or twice a week IT JUST IS NOT GOING TO BE READ!
I started my career writing the Hunting Beach Homeowners Association newsletter, almost 60 years ago. I have been involved in newsletters for all the years I owned a printing business. That was the major source of our business. It’s got to go out regularly and it has to be placed in the hands of the intended audience. Anything less will lead to the death of the newsletter and eventually the organization.
Thank you for your valuable input. We fixed the Weekly Newsletter and now also provide a Daily News feed. You can now Manage your subscription at the base of the newsletter by clicking on “update your preferences”. We have also revamped our newsletter sign up form available at https://www.citizensjournal.us/newsletter-subscribe/
We have implemented are push notifications. Which if approved by the reader will popup a notification in the operating system when new articles are published.
Additionally we will be building a user feedback forum so our readers can easily reach out to us to give their feedback and recommendations.
Thank you for reading and commenting. And thank you for sharing the articles that are important to you on social media.
Michael Weyant
Chief Technology Officer
Citizens Journal
Maybe…maybe not. We’ll see. Oh yea…where is Hunting Beach?