Happy 1st Birthday, Cape Cod Wave!

MAY 16, 2014 – Hey, hey, it’s our birthday! Cape Cod Wave is 1 year old today. And like the 1-year-old that we are, we have just learned how to walk and we hate the word “No.”

At 10 pm on May 16, 2013, we launched Cape Cod Wave with the hope of creating important magazine-style storytelling journalism, with a large dash of culture and fun. Our goal was to fill a void in the Cape Cod market. We have no interest in competing on anyone’s terms but our own.

We are a tiny staff of two, and we would like to thank you for taking the time over the past year to get to know us and, more importantly, getting to know the people we have gotten to know. The reason we do these stories is because they are interesting. We hope you agree.

Our first story was a short slideshow and essay, Sunrise at Newcomb Hollow Beach, that began with this sentence, “Morning in America starts here.” We still believe that about Cape Cod.

This place is special, with the most spectacular landscape and some of the most talented, interesting people of anywhere in America. This is not Gertrude Stein’s Oakland. There’s a “there” here. We hope you like what we have showed you in the first year.

(Announcing CCW Classic – Most of our stories are evergreen, or close to it. Although some of you have been following since the beginning, newcomers may not know of the rich potpourri of Cape Cod Wave stories from past year. So we will occasionally bring to the top of our page an old story, and label it “CCW Classic.” It will stay at the top for a few days, and then we’ll go find something else from our year-deep vault of stories to bring to the top)

We have been journalists for a long time, but in this magazine we are mere infants. Still, we have noticed that the media landscape on Cape Cod has gotten more crowded, and more interesting and we are thrilled to see some of the new faces, while we are cheering for the old guard to evolve.

The truth is that you, as readers, deserve the best marketplace of ideas about this peninsula we all call home. We are cheering for everybody. We hope that we add something to the discourse.

Issues are important, but this site is more than that. One of us, Brian, has spent an inordinate amount of time covering surfers and guitar players in the past year. And you may noticed several theater and art stories from Laura.

We have also tried to visit the most spectacular locations on the Cape and bring you slideshows of Cape nature at its most awe-inspiring.

And with a focus on music, we have begun to build an impressive catalog of 2-minute videos of musicians from Provincetown to Woods Hole.

So enough about us…. okay, do you want to hear more about us? It’s our birthday. We are deep into our third cake of the day. So please let us say…

In one year, we have covered churches and drag queens, housing and employment issues, and some of the most notorious crimes in recent decades on Cape Cod. Our stories are 6,000 words long, 4,000 words long, 1,000 words long, or sometimes 200 words will do. We like pretty pictures, and we think that videos of musicians playing music is a pretty good way to show a musician.

We are evolving. Someday soon, we hope to have swag – T-shirts and the like. For now, we continue to concentrate on creating great unique journalism for you, while we ask you to please visit our sponsors. We also hope to soon create more room for advertisers on our page, as we grow, without disrupting the unique look of Cape Cod Wave.

We believe that people on Cape Cod want more than mug shots, meetings, and a calendar of events. Our point is that there some topics that Cape Cod Wave does not need to cover.

We think we fill a void. We try to cover what others don’t, including important issues affecting Cape Cod, and profiles of people who wouldn’t normally make the news. What is not important to others is often most important to us. In fact, we believe that almost all of the interesting and even important stuff happening on Cape Cod is in the most unexpected places. We choose to look around.

There really is a true sense of place on Cape Cod.

We are Cape Cod Wave. It’s our place. It’s your place.

But it’s our birthday.

We are 1 year old today, and we are figuring out our place in the world. Yeah, hold on, we’re about to enter our Terrible Twos.

– Laura M. Reckford & Brian Tarcy