OK, here … WordPress doesn’t support live links in titles.
OK people, listen up. There’s a fair bit of comment bubbling along about our ability/difficulties getting papers delivered. It started Sunday night with a lone heckler on our live blog (somebody logged in as Mike’s PC Repair), wondering in a somewhat sarcastic tone if we were going to airlift in the papers. Meanwhile, we were updating that same live blog constantly.
Then VPR put out a story (later corrected) saying we were flooded out of the Barre facility again and would not be delivering papers anywhere on Monday. Other state media have also been speculating about it I’m told (honestly, too busy to watch, sorry if that offends anybody) … all of which is different than, say, calling us to ask how we’re doing.
In fact, we got deliveries to all but two Times Argus routes; the Herald is much harder hit as far as deliveries, but hey, seeing as how there’s no deliveries of gasoline, food, medicine, electricity or dry goods, I don’t know why we should be held to a hugely different standard. That said, the Monday and Tuesday papers were on my doorstep early this morning, we can’t keep enough in the stores today and we’re printing a couple of thousand extra copies tomorrow … despite having many of our outlying communities cut off and getting FEMA airdrops of emergency supplies.
But more to the point, it’s the supposedly contemporary media unable to see what’s going on. Yes, we’ve had a hard time getting newsprint here. But we’ve got reporters all over the state. We’ve been on the ground with reporters and photographers in (among the hardest-hit places) Wilmington, Ludlow, Brattleboro, Woodstock, Killington, Brandon, Pittsford, Pittsfield, Stockbridge, Clarendon, Bennington and Arlington. I can’t even list them all … . We’ve already got three stories from places you can’t get to yet, reported live … and that’s not to mention the dozens (hundreds?) of readers who have contributed stuff directly or through social media.
We’ve had between two and four staff members working pretty much constantly on our blog, plus a live feed combining Twitter and reader feeds, plus extra pages and pages online of content that we don’t have the space for in the newsprint edition … all of which we made available yesterday and today for free online, much of which is on our free site at vermonttoday.com.
We’ve had an enormous online audience — upwards of 170,000+ a few hours ago — responded live to reader queries, updated information on the fly for the city, state, CVPS, the hospital, fire, police. And the naysayers — most of whom like to think of themselves as “new media” players — are fixated on the dead tree edition.
Wake up and smell the pixels, folks. We’re not a newspaper company, we’re a news company, and my staff and the staff at the TA are kicking ass.
thistownvt 