Looking Back: My Time with VISTA Today

By

Former VISTA Today editor Lance Knickerbocker.

This story always begins the same way: with a question.

“What brought you to Chester County?”

In the summer of 2014, Ken Knickerbocker hit me up on Facebook, of all places. What was I doing? Would I be interested in helping him refine and relaunch a new-journalism project? Did I have time for a phone call?

By Labor Day, I was a full-time resident. Ken and I set about writing a business plan and preparing for meetings with the Chester County Economic Development Council, which served as a crucial sounding board for our ideas at the time.

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We changed our name from Chesco Business Today to VISTA Today. We whittled our message to the simplest expression of our own values as a company, values that grew out of Ken’s optimism and early recognition of Chester County as a singular place to live and raise a family. VISTA Today would tell that story – the story of how great it is to live in Chester County.

We took lots of meetings. We nurtured a core group of early adopters who loved reading positive, upbeat stories about the people they’d been doing business with their whole lives. We grew slowly but surely. We made mistakes. We corrected most of them.

I still laugh when I think back to when we were sending a simple text-only e-mail to about 70 people on our mailing list.

I’ve been happy to get to know Chester County about as well as anyone could in three years. In that time, I’ve gotten to know so many incredible people who, in true Chester County fashion, probably don’t think of themselves as all that special. And that’s fine.

That’s why VISTA Today is here.

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