A call to fingers!
And brains and hearts...
Friends, neighbors, West Siders. First, Happy New Year to us. We made it through a wild one and we’re glad to be here.
When we last wrote, Katie and David announced they would be leaving the newsletter behind, but also promised at least one more issue. We’re fulfilling that promise now with a call to fingers.
Since the last issue we’ve heard many people lamenting the loss of Neighborhood Character and that’s given us a chance to reflect on the role of the newsletter in our community and the wider city. A small group of concerned West Siders met last week and decided if we could get enough people to help us with the content and distribution, the newsletter was worth keeping aloft.
What are we trying to do?
We want to revamp Neighborhood Character and keep what we (and you) love about it: honesty, curiosity, unfiltered opinions. But we need a crew to do it.
We want Neighborhood Character to be a community unto itself. We want to keep interviewing local characters, keep asking questions and keep shining a light on the shadowy corners of Jersey City politics. Mostly we want to keep each other informed and engaged. We want to bring some context to the disparate coverage of our city and, wherever possible, bring a little peace and a little grace to the anarchy.
But we need an infrastructure and that means a group that shares editorial responsibilities.
Amy Wilson created a community here with this newsletter – or at least a place where that community could gather and recognize itself. Now that community has a chance to take over. Her legacy, for us, will always be this: No matter how effed up the world is, there’s plenty you can do right in your neighborhood to make life a little better for people.
We’re entering 2026 with a new mayor and a new council. This means that we’ll have new voices, new promises and new policies that will need keeping an eye on — as well as our old problems that won’t just magically vanish because we have a new guy steering the ship. We want this newsletter to be a place where we can talk about how these changes will affect our West Side community, and be a place where we can share resources, information and actionable steps for community involvement.
We also want to celebrate the many things that make our neighborhood special: the art, the music, the ghost carnivals, the feral cats, the schools, the community groups —all the things that bring us together.
What can you do?
Fill out our form, for starters.
The basics are basic. We need people to write stuff every week and people to help edit. We need help compiling the newsletter, making sure it gets out each week on time. We need ideas, events, complaints, inquiries. We need photos, poems, stories, gossip.
What we really need is a core group to design and share responsibilities so not too much burden falls on anyone and we still get a fairly consistent newsletter. Maybe you can contribute now and then. Maybe you want to be more involved than that. The commitment doesn’t have to be big, but we want you to be a part of this.
If you’d like to be involved, please fill out our survey and/or email us at neighborhoodcharacter@gmail.com or reach out privately.
To subscribers
To our paid subscribers, we are sorry to have abandoned you in this uncertain time, but we’ll absolutely issue refunds if you reach out to the same email.
We plan to see if we get any interest after this callout and we’ll also be doing a little recruiting in and around the environs.
We’ll provide regular updates on our progress. Thank you and Happy New Year from all of us at Neighborhood Character.
Here’s our survey, one more time.