The Gazet

We would like to take this opportunity to introduce you to your 40th Ward web site.

You may have noticed that we’ve “coined” a new name for the ward site that employs a shorter variation, “gazet,” of the more familiar “gazette.” We’re excited about the resonances of this titling choice for our online community news portal, and we’d like to share our thinking with you. Both words derive from the Italian gazetta, a medieval coin of small denomination worth about a cent and a half, the cost of a newspaper of the day. From the 17th century onward the word once denoting the coin itself came to refer to the physical newspaper it once purchased and was gradually imported into English. So derived official governmental publications such as The London Gazette, The Edinburgh Gazette, The Dublin Gazette, The Belfast Gazette, and others. In time the term gazette came to be virtually synonymous with the printed news media of large metropolitan areas.

The work of The 40th Ward Daily Gazet is of a substantively different range and focus: to serve as a digital news portal for the citizens of the 40th Ward community within the larger civic structure of Chicago. Our Gazet strives to highlight and create shortcuts to relevant news items and online resources for the folks who reside in our local neighborhoods of Peterson Park, Arcadia Terrace, Budlong Woods, Bowmanville, Rogers Park, Albany Park, Hollywood, Ravenswood, Andersonville, and Edgewater. Where the small Venetian gazzetta once purchased the daily news for a mere pittance, the 40th Ward Daily Gazet serves as an inherently free web tool for its community members.

Over time we’ve culled information derived from telephone calls and email queries made to the Alderman’s office by individual ward constituents and pulled it all together to develop a comprehensive resource that can serve the needs of all. From your inquiries and input we’ve derived a compendium of stories and information about the city, the ward, and the people and organizations resident within it. Additionally, we strive to shape the Daily Gazet as a comprehensible guide to governmental and public health and information resources available across the maze of the larger internet. It’s our hope to make this site even more interactive and community-crafted as time goes on—to that end we welcome your diverse perspectives, questions, and input to grow a truly representational resource together that we can all use and be proud of.