The Locust Fork News-Journal Approaches Five Years in Business

I wish I could figure out a way to have a blues tune playing on the screen while you are reading this post, but then, that would just be a distraction anyway. One of these days I’m going to get around to finishing that blues song I started working on many years ago called The Alabama Power Blues.

I woke up Sunday morning,
and the power was off again…

Every time this happens, it plays havoc with the Charter cable Internet connection, even with a TrippLite installed to prevent the modem and router and computers from going off during a power outage.

It also places unnecessary wear and tear on the hard drives of all three of the computers we have online over here that it takes to produce and maintain this Website.

To make matters worse, on March 13, YouTube will no longer support the operating system or Web browser on this Apple laptop, which means in a couple of weeks, I will no longer be able to access or post YouTube videos on this site — unless we figure out a way to raise enough money to buy a new computer.

Once the power came back on this morning, I cranked up the coffee pot and placed an ad on the free online classified site Craigslist.org seeking to buy a used or refurbished MacBook Pro computer. This is going to be an essential tool to accomplish the planned upgrades to this site and to ramp up our news operation in the months ahead.

Before I ask for your contribution, let me give you, our faithful readers, an update of where we are.

When we first obtained the domain name LocustFork.Net and some blogging software and began published this site nearly five years ago, we had no idea what the future would bring. I just knew that the federal government was broken under Bush-Cheney-Rove-Rumsfeld-Condi, and that the press in this country was not doing the job called for under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Since that time, we have been able to break stories, investigate stories and write many stories even the alternative weeklies were not doing, much less the new New York Times. I will save you the litany of links for another day, but I do want to point out some of the successes we’ve had on the economic side of things.

This site is one of the few alternative, independent news operations on the Web Press that has been fully self-sustaining through Web advertising and individual contributions for the past five years. We have built the economic interface as well as the news publishing interface to be in a position to do the job corporate, chain newspapers are not doing.

All the experts know print news publications will never again be a growth industry, which means their stock prices are dead. They must either figure out the Web or go the way of the horse drawn carriage and the Dodo bird.

The problem is, even in print, newspapers have let the citizens of this country down time and time again over the past 30 years, when the trend toward professionalized, public relations culture first started to turn newspapers into corporate mouthpieces instead of guardians of democracy for the public.

Starting in about 2004 with the advent of blogging software, some independent bloggers started making a difference nationally and in their communities. But in many cases, these sites were started and run by people operating anonymously with little or no university level training in journalism, public relations or political science. Thus what has developed so far is a hodge podge of blogs, a confusing landscape for the public already grappling with the fast pace of technological change.

We have managed to sell the very first political advertising on the Web on a news site not associated with a brick and mortar business using ink, paper and delivery trucks, at least in Alabama and probably the South. There are sites in New York, Washington, D.C., other major cities and on the West Coast where there are active, successful models in progress.

A number of readers have realized the value of the job we are doing and made donations. We have regular contributers in North and South Alabama as well as Georgia, Tennessee, New York, Massachusetts and even Montana and Oregon.

We are also partnering up with other sites involved in building the Web Press, like Truthout.org and Alternet.org, both located on the West Coast but interested in original news and commentary from the American South.

But like public television and radio and any new, smart, progressive publication, we are always struggling to find more resources to do more, to actually find a way to live up to the so-called Great Commission of American journalism – to watchdog the government and keep people informed enough so that citizens in this country can make democracy work.

As always, it is an ideal standard that is often unreachable. At the very least, we try to uphold some minimum standards of scientific objectivity and publishing the truth, even though like every other human enterprise, we sometimes fall short and make mistakes.

On that final note, it is time for Sunday brunch, so I’ll stop and say won’t you please consider making a contribution to this site through the donation button above? Or, consider sponsoring this site with your advertising dollars, instead of giving it to the mainstream press and broadcast media, which you know will never cover the news as wide open as we can.

We must raise enough money to buy a new computer, in addition to the never-ending need to cover the expenses of investigating stories and getting out on the road to practice Mobile Journalism (MoJo). We also need a bigger lens for the Nikon digital camera, not only to get even better wild bird photos that you love so much, but to chase down some politicians who think they can escape corrupt scrutiny in a land where the press is mostly sound asleep.

Please hit that donation button today! You will be glad you did. Thanks!

Tags: Building the Alternative, Independent, Watchdog Web Press

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 7th, 2010 at 12:24 pm and is filed under Blog Advertising, Fund Raising, Media Reform. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.