February 2024 will mark the third year that Fort Atkinson Online LLC has had the pleasure of serving the greater Fort Atkinson area.

As we reach our three-year anniversary, we could not be more pleased and humbled by the warm reception and support we’ve received from members of the community.

Fort Atkinson Online LLC announced in July of this year the development of a sister site to our already established FortAtkinsonOnline.com online newspaper: WhitewaterWise.com.

While Fort Atkinson Online covers the area from a Fort Atkinson and a Jefferson County perspective, the new site is developed to cover area news from a Whitewater perspective.

As a publisher of online newspapers, we are eager to bring you local news stories, and other developed information about activities and events, and other bits of news and commentary that, we hope, will aid you, our readers, in making informed decisions as you seek to make the best lives for you and your family.

In 2024, we plan to work with diligence to continue to bring you the news and our professionally developed content, all of which is free of charge to view and read.

Help us grow

As we grow, we find that visitors to our news sites are interested in sharing our content.

We could not be more pleased.

The best way to help us grow so we can continue to bring you free, professional quality content is to help us build readership.

Here are the dos and don’ts:

Please do: share our links on your websites and social media pages. Links to our stories, photo albums and videos can be shared through share buttons provided on our news sites, and through share buttons provided on our Facebook pages. They also can be shared by opening our story, album or video links, and copying the URL at the top of your browser, and pasting it into the various content fields provided on your websites and social media pages.

Sharing our links is such a helpful practice and we are delighted when you take these steps.

Please don’t: Lift, remove, screen shot or copy individual elements from our stories and albums, such as photographs and text, and place them on your sites and pages, or pass them to other sites and pages independently of our links. Like all news sites and professional content creators, we own the copyright to our content. When you lift these elements, you violate our copyright protection and, effectively, cut us out of the process of benefiting from the very content we have worked to create.

As a for-profit business, we rely on building readership so that our advertisers, who pay for space on our platforms, can benefit from the traffic — the readers — who come to look at our content. It costs us money to operate and create traffic, so we really need to benefit from the content we create. We hope the benefit to our readers is that they do find informative, reliable reporting and other types of enjoyable and unique content made available to them for viewing for free.

Sometimes content creators guard against copyright infringements by using watermarks on their photos. At Fort Atkinson Online LLC, we have decided against watermarks because they make the photos less easy to view and enjoy. Our hope is that, if we each act with respect for one another, our full readership can enjoy the free content we create, and make it possible for us to continue to share the content for free while we grow our sites.

When each of us are respectful of other content creators’ copyrights, we all benefit from the experience of viewing the work. At FortAtkinsonOnline.com and WhitewaterWise.com, we all benefit from viewing that content for free.

If you are appreciative of the services we provide, please respect our copyrights and share our links, and, in so doing, serve as an example so other folks who would like to share our content can see how it’s respectfully done. We thank and applaud you for helping us in this effort. We truly believe educating the public about copyright protections and infringements will make us all better, and stronger, as we each seek to enjoy information made available in our communities.

We also are pleased to note that most of our readers do share our links. Every once in a while, we run into folks who misunderstand the copyright process. We hope this guidance will help.

At Fort Atkinson Online LLC, we love what we do, and we love it when our readers find appreciation in our work. Please share our links, maintaining respect for our copyrights, and help us grow, so we can continue to do what we love and do best: serve you, our communities, with professional, accurate, well-researched, written reporting and depicted content.

As always, thanks for reading.

Kim

Editor

FAO/WWise