Welcome to the editorial section of kawarthaNOW.com! Our focus and slogan is “We live here”. Our editorial content celebrates The Kawarthas — our food and wine, our people, our music, our arts, and our beautiful landscape and waterways. You’ll always find a great profile, upcoming event, or new thing to see and do in the five counties that we cover.
The journey of kawarthanow.com has been a winding road over many years — 16 years, 3 weeks and a few days to be exact. kawarthaNOW.com is an online community magazine. Creating a magazine that exists only online was a wild idea that I had in late 1995, when I first dialed up with a modem.
At the time, I was working as an editor for three local print magazines and the impact of the potential of the internet struck me immediately. I made plans to transition my work and left print behind permanently. My team launched that wild idea with quidnovis.com during the first week of May in 1996. We were excited to receive 4000 gross hits that first week. Right after that “Quid Novis” became very busy creating websites — it was the new-fangled thing in those days, and we were inundated with requests.
We maintained quidnovis.com as a non-profit community site for many years, while continuing to build websites as our main business. We watched browsers develop and search engines come and go, with some — like Google — staying and thriving. We honed our skills in search engine optimization over those years, and our programming staff built custom web applications for our events and venue database.
When the time came to raise the bar to a new level, we decide to change the site name and brand. We trademarked kawarthaNOW in the summer of 2010 and relaunched our new name with a new look.
Welcome to our new kawarthaNOW team members!
Carol Lawless is a well-known Kawartha writer, editor, and social media diva who is now our Features Editor.
Those of you who are “Lawless fans” can look forward to her creative flare with both the keyboard and the community, in kawarthaNOW’s new feature columns.
I’m also pleased to welcome Josh Fewings, a local writer who is the drummer in Peterborough band The Avenues. Josh also plays guitar.
He’s a man about Peterborough in several roles, and is not afraid of stepping out as the promoter of a concert or two. Josh will be writing our arts and culture features.
We are grateful to photographers Mark Ridout and Esther Vincent for contributing to our first issue.
We’re all excited about our new content and are already working on our next set of columns. We hope you enjoy it. I’d really like to hear your feedback — the good, bad and the ugly.
If there are story gems out there in The Kawarthas that you are aware of, please do let us know.
Jeannine “JT” Taylor
Publisher and Managing Editor
kawarthaNOW.com
