Downeybeat.com won a free scholarship to community journalism convention in Chicago!

The Reynolds Journalism Institute has given the downeybeat.com a complete travel scholarship for the Block by Block: Community News Summit 2012 in September in Chicago.

The scholarship includes airfare and a hotel.

I don’t know what the heck I did to win this thing, but I can’t believe someone or something is paying for me to go. Hopefully I’ll come back with a ton of good ideas to make the site better.

The summit is designed to help people like me thrive, and it will have seminars on content, marketing, social media and the like.

I think I owe you readers a lot of thanks for this. I started this thing Aug. 9, and it has steadily built its audience. People are commenting quite a bit lately, and residents are taking the time to call or email me to make sure I know what’s going on around the city. It gets a little lonely operating a mostly one-man show, but readers keep me encouraged.

I should also let you know that the little ‘share’ ‘email’ ‘like’ counters don’t work due to a problem with the company that provides that service. So, if you’re used to seeing dozens of hundreds of shares on the stories, don’t fret, I’m getting more hits than ever the last two months.  The company, sharethis, says they’re trying to fix the counters. I’ll put the counters back up when they work.