IN A NUTSHELL - HERE'S WHY
Here is a concise (although far from complete) list of things you should know. Most of these items I have kept generally quiet – or at least professional – about. Well, the time for being in the silent majority is over. I have decided that now is the time when the best defense is a good offense.
WEBSITE WARS GET STUPID AND SLOPPY
When the Bloomfield Free Press was founded, it came with a website – because we realize that a lot of people from Bloomfield and Eastern Greene County are no longer here – especially those associated with NSWC Crane and SAIC.
We only started putting breaking news on the website after a full-page advertising campaign and numerous editorial comments were launched this direction by the folks in Linton saying things like ‘weekly newspapers are only reporting history,’ and ‘why wait a week for your news?
So, we showed them by publishing breaking news as it happens. Most times, if there is breaking news overnight, you can see it on the web when you boot up your computer the next morning at work.
The other thing the website wars locally were a battle of numbers – which I really don’t care about.
Most recently, our little website – which was designed and hosted locally – has reached nearly 2 million hits a month on average. That’s pretty good, considering that we don’t have a giant staff of web designers cranking out websites for an entire conglomerate newspaper company in Missouri.
It’s just us. Literally, after staying up all night getting Wednesday’s paper ready for print, and after driving hundreds of miles all over the area delivering the paper, I sit down Wednesday late in the afternoon and work on the website.
So, when we hit 1.8 million hits in a single month, I put a single column by inch-and-a-half filler ad in the paper one week, telling everyone that we were thankful for their support. I said ‘Thanks for making us your number one source of online news in Greene County.’
Innocuous enough, I thought.
That little filler ad was met by huge ads in the Linton paper and its supposed-mass-circulation shopper (which, by the way does NOT go to any post office boxes). It attacked us for having the audacity to thank our web supporters.
Unfortunately, the web war has grown to such proportions that the folks in Linton are so set on ‘beating’ the Bloomfield Free Press in getting the news out online that they completely have forsaken decorum, professionalism and just common decency.
Examples:
A few weeks ago, there was a fatal accident on a Greene County roadway. Literally hours before the deceased person’s family could even be located, they had photos of the wreck – including shots showing the dead person’s car plainly – on the web. The office of the Greene County Coroner had to call the Linton paper’s office and request they take down the photos until the guy’s wife could be notified.
This was not the first time that happened. I can name at least four other incidents in which the nature of paranoid news gathering by Greene County’s third newspaper led to improper actions - including running the 'bloody sheet' picture on the front page ... in color.
These incidents also include taking pictures at an accident scene of a dead guy while he was still in the car. When the photographer was told to stop, he refused and had to be threatened with confiscation of his camera. It also includes one of their reporters breaking the barriers at a bomb scare not once or twice, but four times. That means that instead of searching for bombs or explosives at Bloomfield School, lawmen had to spent time dealing with someone who couldn’t listen when they were ordered to get at least a block away and let the professionals do their jobs.
I have been at fires where firemen had to wait for one of their reporters to move their car before crews could get the fire truck in to fight a house fire.
Granted, it only took two minutes, but that was two minutes they could have been putting water on a blaze.
The other thing the web wars has done is make it necessary for the folks west of Bloomfield to do absolutely stupid things like questioning victims at an auto accident – while they are being treated by medical personnel.
I’m not making this stuff up, folks. I have witnessed it all, and can provide other witnesses if necessary.
While speaking about the war for web supremacy in Greene County – which is a lot like kissing one’s sister – I can’t avoid mentioning the never-ending theft of news and ideas from www.bloomfieldfreepress.com. We were the first news site to put up breaking news. We were the first to ask our readers for comments. We were the first to use our site as a community service - not a bottomless revenue stream.
It got bad enough a year ago that I actually took down the site for a while. Quite frankly, I got tired of doing all of the work, just to have the other guys steal our stories. There were instances where I withheld a story for a couple of days – although reports were available immediately – just to see if they could manage to get the news first. They did not. On one occasion, I actually altered the time and location of an automobile accident by 500 feet and 23 minutes.
Guess what, the other folks’ website had a ‘breaking news’ story about the accident on State Route 58 with the exact parameters I gave on my website.
So, I am offering a peaceful and professional resolution to the web war.
My solution – quit worrying about a weekly newspaper’s website. So what if we post breaking news in a timely fashion. Quit being so insecure and just do your job. How much of a threat can a weekly newspaper’s website be to a daily newspaper’s website – unless you are not doing your job or are too lazy to do it right?