By Marianne Lincoln

It was ten years ago that I made the decision to dive into the shortage of local news in South Pierce County. I contacted Ben Sclair from the Suburban Times, we met August 14, 2012, and I got some pointers on setting up the WordPress site. Then boom, on August 16^th, the first story appeared on the Pierce Prairie Post. The name was dubbed by my friend Karen Ansteth, to honor the large prairie that this area had once been.

The older articles were transferred after 5 years to archive pages due to space limitations WordPress had at the time. You can find them here:

Your Site ‹ PrairiePost2012 — WordPress.com

Your Site ‹ prairiepost2013 — WordPress.com

The Pierce Prairie Post (PPP) was an effort to continue to get event information out to the South Pierce County area from the Spanaway Community Association. The Tacoma News Tribune only seemed to print stories after the events. That wasn’t helping all our great organizations to have a chance to get turnout for all their volunteer efforts.

The Pierce Prairie Post still loves to receive emails from local organizations with upcoming events. We try to get to them as quickly as possible. Of Course, these have been somewhat slowed since my cancer treatment began, but I am still trying to get the highlights until this treatment ends in late September.

One of the challenges of the PPP is that it is organized under the Spanaway Community Association which has 501(c)(3) charitable status. That prevents it from taking sides in ballot issues. If there is an item up for vote, we have to carefully present it without taking side. So those are usually fairly thin stories with just the facts. Because of that, Editor Marianne Lincoln created 253Watch, which is a personal site, not part of the Community Association. 253Watch covers Pierce County more broadly, much less often, and with a more critical eye.

Your Site ‹ 253 Watch — WordPress.com

Spanaway, Midland, Parkland, Summit, Frederickson, Elk Plain, Lacamas, Roy, McKenna, Graham, Thrift, Kapowsin are listed on the header. Occasionally Orting, Wilkeson, Carbonado, Yelm, Elbe, and Alder have also made appearances. How could we not tell the Nisqually history tied to the area?

We raise our glass to the loyal readers today and hope that we can continue to provide this service as long as possible. It is an all volunteer project. The advertising you see benefits the WordPress site. The PPP does not sell advertising, although there is a page listed for that, 800 readers are not enough to get the interest of advertisers. 800 readers are enough to get turn out to the Garfield Street Fair next week (August 20) though, or to get people involved in saving the Parkland School. The Lacamas Fair is August 27, along with LeMay Cars Marymount and the Spana’ Jam at Sprinker.

Bless all of you for being here to follow what is happening. If you haven’t signed up, there is a digest you can receive that only goes to your email at 6am the morning after we post a new story. It looks like this at the bottom of the page if you scroll down.

If you choose to Follow instead, you will get an email each time when a story is posted, that can create a lot of email. It also often shows you my typos which I try to correct, but get permanently archived in those initial emails… oops.

You can also find our stories on Facebook and Twitter.

The PPP strives to bring good stories you don’t hear other places, area history, land use, and events. We call it the Good News, News. Crime and horror stories are prevalent enough on other media sources. There is much to be proud of out here. The Pierce Prairie Post is where you can send that news, so others will see it!

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