Important news happens every single day in The Villages. But with just one “Hometown Newspaper” which can’t cover everything, (and seems to “miss” a lot of news that the developer would rather you not hear about) it can be hard for one to stay “in the know”.
This is one of the reasons I created The Villages Monthly, and I love it when Villagers who subscribe write in to tell me that they never heard anything about some of the news stories before I told them about it.
To compile each issue of The Villages Monthly I scour more than 50 publications from both inside and outside of The Villages for the most important news happening any given month, as well as those stories that have miraculously remained under the radar of the local media. Now, I can’t give away the farm and tell you how I do it all, you’ll just have to subscribe 
But I will show you one little trick I use that I think you might find useful.
Our good friend Google has a little service called Google News Alerts. You can access this by going to http://www.google.com/alerts
From the image below you can see just how easy this is to set up.
Here it is for you step-by-step:
Step 1: type in the search term you want alerts about, in this case I’ve used “The Villages Florida”
Step 2: tell them the type of content you want them to look for (best to leave this as the default “Everything”)
Step 3: set how often you want to receive updates. I choose to get mine once a day, but you can also select “as it happens” or “once a week”.
Step 4: Enter your email address.
That’s it. You’ll start getting news about The Villages that you might be missing out on right now.
Now, Google News Alerts isn’t a perfect service. One thing you’ll notice is that some of the stories in the alerts you receive actually have nothing to do with The Villages in Florida. You’ll get stories on the villages in Africa and other parts of the world from stories that have the word “Florida” somewhere in them . Maybe the story originated from a Florida newspaper or TV station or the author is based in Florida, etc. You just kind of have to weed these out as you’re scanning the alerts. Or, of course, subscribe to The Villages Monthly and let me do the work for you 
A few weeks ago we opened up a brand new “Member’s Center” where subscribers can read and download all past issues of The Villages Monthly and the interviews we do with Villagers every month. We also have some member’s only special reports, educational videos, and discounts on the way in the coming weeks and months.
Another benefit of being a subscriber is that you can ask us a question right from the Member’s Center and we’ll do everything we can to respond within 72 hours.
Just to give you an idea of the types of questions readers are asking and the answers they’re receiving, here’s a sample question/answer we did recently:
If you think The Villages Monthly is something that might be of value to you, we hope you’ll join us. Right now we deliver to a little over 500 subscribers, and we look forward to adding you to the list! Click here to subscribe and starting reading past issues today.
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