It’s your world, explore away.

As most people reading this know, we at Vital Media group were, until very recently, the publishers of VITAL Source Magazine. For seven years VITAL lived in print, found monthly on stands around the Milwaukee metro. Focusing mostly on arts and culture with some coverage of community initiatives and issues, VITAL was a great little mag that entertained about 30,000 people once every 30 days. There were addictive regular columns like SubVersions and REEL Milwaukee, locally authored comics and a puzzle page. We hosted some of the city’s most fun parties. But guess what? For all that we did right (and all that could have been done much better) it didn’t matter in the end. When the economic apocalypse hit last year, we knew by late December that it made no sense to hang on to our beloved, arcane publishing model. So we pulled the plug on the printed magazine, which garnered more attention in death than it ever had in life. Go figure.

What transpired in the days that followed can best be called “a long story.” We’d had our new website in development for six months, but even though we were planning all sorts of new experiential features, it was still slated to be the turbo version of the traditional VITAL Source product. In hindsight, this would have garnered a resounding yawn from you and made us just another local website vying for ad dollars and reader eyes. And none of us needed seven more years of that.

So, in a feat that I will go ahead and term derring-do, we sat down with a metaphorical clean sheet of paper and re-imagined ourselves from the ground up. We wanted to remain committed to our local audience, but from a broader horizon of interests and concerns. Of course, that’s just fancy marketing talk for wanting to offer more things of more compelling interest to more readers and include the ideas of more smart and interesting people.

It’s not a revolutionary idea, by any means, but rather the Holy Grail for online publishers, an elusive recipe for the very elixir of life. On a broad scale, Slate and Salon do it right for newsies, as does Technorati for tech-types. These three sites (and others) author a great deal of their own content, but also pull in carefully selected feeds and stories from outside sources compatible with their audience’s interests. The result is a rodeo of voices, a veritable cornucopia of really good reading for folks with a certain set of interests. It’s kind of like the old portal idea from way back at the turn of the 21st century, but amped up with live feeds, sharing tools, social networking opps, video, podcasts and other stuff our (slightly) older siblings only dreamed about.

We believe this model can fill a real need at the local level, at a time when worlds are colliding. On one side, most daily newspapers have moved too slowly to embrace the very real opportunities for high quality, highly local reporting offered by the internet. There’s been some recent progress, but only time will tell if it’s too little, too late. On the other side, dailies have left a vacuum for independent media outlets and community journalists (a.k.a. bloggers) to fill. And rush to fill it these intrepid independents have, creating a busy but largely unnoticed micro-universe of community interest-serving content and coverage on the web, some of it quite good. And while it doesn’t fill the critical need for the in-depth investigative reporting that keeps a democracy strong (the best reason to pray for the recovery of local news media), it does have a lot to offer.

Enter ThirdCoast Digest, where everybody wins. Here you’ll find the still-strong VITAL Source, now published weekly on Thursdays and focusing on what we do best – covering Milwaukee life, culture and community in a literate and entertaining way. You’ll also find Footlights, Outpost Exchange, the Bay View Compass, WMSE, Radio Milwaukee and Fan-belt to start, with other media joining us in the coming weeks and months. And look for great feeds on a broader swath of ideas, from politics and business to local music and healthy living.

We’ve worked hard to create a diverse landscape of perspectives under one proverbial roof. Want to know what’s going on with MPS? Click Big Ideas/Education and check out the latest posts from Public Policy Forum’s Milwaukee Talkie and Uppity Wisconsin. Follow politics? What’s your flavor? From Boots and Sabers to Milwaukee World, you can compare extreme ends of the spectrum as well as peruse fine coverage from the moderate middle. You’ll see the post title and its source, plus an excerpt from that post. Click to read more and you’ll go straight to the source, generating traffic for the original website and leading you to even more undiscovered treasures. It’s your world, explore at will. We’ll provide the map.