Collinsville Daily News

MY GRANDMOTHER FLED SANTIAGO, CHILE IN THE 1970S UNDER THE REIGN OF AUGUSTO PINOCHET.

She later went back to get her children, but my mother and her sister were over 18 years and were not allowed to travel with my grandmother to the United States. They worked for 3 years to get their Visas to come to this country.

My mother had intentions of only staying a short time to say goodbye to her family before returning to Chile to be married. She met my father in a small town east of St. Louis shortly before going back to Chile. She fell in love and decided to leave her life behind and begin a new life in this country. I was born a couple of years later in Alton, IL.

My first paying job was at 12-years-old, delivering newspapers. I worked several jobs as a teenager, but it was the local newspaper that gave me my first career opportunity. I began my career as a secretary in the advertising department at the Telegraph in Alton, IL over twenty years ago. After learning about marketing and advertising, I moved to the automotive sales division at the St. Louis PostDispatch. A few years later, I was managing that 22-million-dollar division through the biggest shift in the newspaper industry as automotive dealers around the country were filing bankruptcy. With a passion to really understand how to grow companies, I launched my first marketing agency.

Today, I own multiple companies that include a full-service digital agency and media corporation. I am the owner and publisher of the Collinsville Daily News.

The Collinsville Daily News is designed to be the heartbeat of the community. We are dedicated to telling the truth in the local news. We want to share the news with you in a context that helps our readers make sense of an increasingly chaotic world.

The mission of Collinsville Daily News is to provide a platform that highlights local news. Our vision is to build a source of local news content for 10 cities across the St. Louis Metro statistical area on both sides of the river. We developed a strong partnership with the HCCSTL to be the “Hub” of Hispanic news across the St. Louis MSA. With rich content from AP News and a content share agreement, we have access to news from around the country with 100 other media publications and companies. Latinidad is our Spanish portal that brings news locally and from around the world in Spanish.

In our first year of business, we have reached over 145,000 readers across more than 137 countries.

We want to share YOUR story. Please send us information that allows us to share your story to the world.

You can contact me at jackie@collinsvilledailynews.com

Jackie Duty, Owner and publisher at Collinsville Daily News