The Locust Fork News-Journal can now claim the distinction as one of the first Web only publications to hold a membership in a state professional press association in the country, an indication that the Web is growing up and moving beyond the era of the anonymous blog.
The board of the Alabama Press Association, made up exclusively of newspaper publishers and editors, voted this week to approve membership for Glynn Wilson’s Web publication, according to Member Services Coordinator Tay Bailey.
“We are extremely pleased that the board saw fit to approve our membership in the state’s professional press association, and we hope to work with the board to write some guidelines for what constitutes the Web Press to pave the way for the future of online news,” said Wilson, editor and publisher of the News-Journal, a daily Web publication started five and a half years ago on the so-called “Information Superhighway” at the domain name or Web address LocustFork.Net.
While the association’s board has discussed the Web in the past, and considered adding a Web category to its annual awards for the Best Newspaper Contest, it has yet to be approved, according to Ms. Bailey.
This move is just one building-block step to constructing an alternative, independent Web Press in this state and country, Wilson said, where all the founding documents, laws and court precedents use the term “press,” as in Freedom of the Press, so Web publications that replace print newspapers cannot be called “blogs.”
Remember the story about blues pioneer Robert Johnson going down to the “crossroads” to make a deal with the devil? To trade his immortal soul for the gift of playing guitar?
Well, I can’t help but wonder what Karl Rove got for his soul? He’s formed a new group called “American Crossroads” to raise millions of dollars in campaign money from secret corporate donors to promote Republicans and smear Democrats.
Rove must have been so pissed off at my question at Brookwood Mall in Birmingham recently that he went back to Washington, D.C., and decided to form a new secretive non-profit group to screw Democrats in the ass in this election cycle.
[The rumor is, Rove is gay. His wife divorced him last year for this, ostensibly, and no we have no qualms about reporting that, since Rove is infamous for using gay rumors against his opponents. That's how he got George W. Bush elected governor of Texas the first time, by putting out the rumor that Ann Richards was a lesbian].
The New York Times, that not so liberal newspaper anymore, simply gushed over Rove’s deal on its front page recently, calling Rove “the Republican master strategist” who led weekly sessions at his Washington residence in 2004 over big plates of his butter-smothered “eggies” and bacon slabs, “where he planned the re-election of President George W. Bush — and what he hoped would be lasting Republican dominion over Democrats.”
Of course that didn’t quite work out, since led by the charismatic presidential candidate Barack Obama and a fired up Netroots Nation, the Democrats took back control of the White House and both houses of Congress in 2008.
The game used to be relatively simple. Build a website. Make it useful and at least moderately pleasing to the eye. Keep it updated. Make your content at least semi-friendly for search engines. Bingo! A digital marketing success story.
Not now.
Like print newspapers, basketball players under 6 feet tall, and the McRib sandwich, the Website as we know it will soon be a thing of the past – a quaint reminder of the original Internet era.
After a huge coding push, we’ve added some cool new ad units to the mix for advertisers, according to a statement by Blogads.com founder Marc Wasserman.
They’ve also incorporating some industry-standard units for your advertisers who like to do it old school.
Please feel free to log in and buy some of these ad types to promote your product, group or candidate.
But Republicans Seem More Enthusiastic About Voting
Democrats hold a 48 percent to 44 percent advantage for the week of July 19-25 in the Gallup Poll’s tracking of registered voters’ preferences for the 2010 congressional elections. This marks the second straight week in which Democrats have held an edge of at least four percentage points.
Although Republicans have moved to a four-point or higher advantage on three separate occasions, this is the first time either party has held an advantage of that size for two consecutive weeks. Republicans and Democrats have been tied on average across the 21 weeks of Gallup’s tracking.
Republicans continue to be substantially more enthusiastic about voting, however, as they have been since March. Their current 18-point lead in voting enthusiasm is down slightly from last week’s 23-point lead, but it remains slightly higher than the average 16-point lead they have enjoyed since tracking began in March.
Independents continue to be more likely to say they will vote for the Republican rather than the Democratic candidate, an indicator that does not bode well for Democrats.
Both Republicans and Democrats maintain more than 90 percent allegiance for their party’s candidates.
Exactly what is behind the uptick in support for Democrats is not clear, although last week’s gains coincided with the passage of the financial reform bill.
BlogAds.Com launched a new program today that pays bloggers who bring advertisers to other blogs.
This is a great example of building the economy for the Web Press from one of the oldest, first companies in the country to develop a working business model for Web advertising.
You can see a short video describing how the new function works here.
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.
During the 1995-96 academic year, I spent most of my time sitting in the Gorgas library at the University of Alabama scanning the New York Times on microfilm and reading stories about the environment along side public opinion polls. I spent a small fortune paying to print those stories for a Master’s thesis looking at how media coverage affects public opinion.
There was no search engine called Google in those early days, and most newspapers had not yet started backing up their stories in online databases such as Lexis-Nexis. So to conduct research, you had to go to the library and pull up old newspapers on microfilm and put change in the machine to print the stories.
The Internet company America Online was just coming on the scene, the Web browser Netscape had just been created, and a conservative convenience store clerk named Matt Drudge had 1,000 subscribers to one of the first e-mail lists. By the fall of 1996, about the time I moved to Milledgeville to teach at Georgia College the year the Olympics came to Atlanta and put up my first Web site, Drudge had started the first “news aggregation” Web site, The Drudge Report.
Bill Clinton was enjoying a great run as president and was reelected in a landslide that fall, in part because the U.S. economy was booming thanks to the dramatic increases in worker productivity due to the personal computer revolution.
Yes, old Bob Dole fell off that stage and didn’t run a great campaign. But a majority of the American people felt the government and the economy were working, so why change? In fact, by the year 1999, the Clinton-Gore administration had wiped out the Reagan budget deficit. Remember the “peace dividend?”
Are you an advertiser trying to find the most economical way to reach that dream demographic audience? Are you a political candidate trying to build name recognition without having to spend a fortune on road side signs? Are you with a non-profit organization trying to raise the profile of your group and the issues you support and gain new members? Are you with a law firm or other legal or moneyed entity looking for an alternative place online to see people, issues and events covered in a way you find lacking in traditional media outlets?
With newspaper circulations in free-fall and more people turning to the Web for news and information, sponsoring independent alternative Web publications through blog advertising is becoming THE WAY to go!
Data now shows that more and more, advertising in traditional media is a waste of time and money. You want to be seen on the hottest blogs around. And there is no doubt this independent news site is being read by the most influential members of communities not only in Alabama, but all over the country and the world.
The Locust Fork News-Journal is one of the fastest and most tasteful news sites anywhere online covering politics, science, nature and the environment, media news and views and more. This is not just some little opinion blog or home to a bunch of activist rantings and ravings.
Weblogs were designed to be an alternative to the mainstream, corporate news media — the printing press of the future! With a quarter century of real journalism education and experience behind us, we challenge any blogger or newspaper anywhere for results. We break news and write with flair.
Data shows that readers of blogs are hyper-influentials. According to a 2007 blog reader survey, these are hyper-engaged online — 68 percent spend five or more hours a week reading blogs, 21 percent have their own blogs and 61 percent leave comments on blogs, the modern equivalent of the letter to the editor.
And they’re hyper-engaged offline as well. Ninety percent voted in 2006, 81 percent have written or called an elected official and 70 percent have donated online in the last six months to a cause or campaign, while 78 percent have college degrees and 53 percent make more than $75,000 a year.
For many companies and candidates in the American South, making the transition to the Web from traditional media advertising lags behind the rest of the country. But the day is coming soon when the transition will take place.
If you want to help get this trend going, and just don’t understand how it all works, get in touch with us and we will help you. Watch this video if you are interested and want to know more…
For national advertisers who want to reach this growing audience and help create the new Web economy, Buy National Ads.
Use this unique combination of a news and blog interface to reach an affluent, tech-savvy audience who more and more are turning to FREE online news sites to keep up with the news on politics and government, business and labor, science, nature and the environment, media news and views and more.
If you are a local business or political candidate, and don’t understand how this works, get in touch and we will even build your Website and show you how to raise money online too.
You can also directly target this site with Google ad words.
If you are not an advertiser or a politician, but you like this site and want to keep it free so you don’t have to subscribe or sign up for an insidious cookie to read it, consider buying a T-shirt or coffee mug or mouse pad in our online shop.
If you just appreciate what we do here and want to keep it FREE, consider making a large or small donation by credit card or PayPal. Just click on the button below, type in the amount, and presto!
Every dollar we raise in this way goes to cover the expenses of travel to get to the stories YOU want to see covered. Anybody can sit around in a basement and make editorial comments, which is what most bloggers do. We are actually going out there and covering stories on the road — when we have the resources to get out there and JUST DO IT!
So if you have considered helping out before, but have so far just procrastinated that decision, now is the time to act! We need your help to continue providing the coverage you have come to enjoy — and to ramp up our coverage to greater heights! We have only just begun to explore the possibilities!
TRAFFIC REPORT: The Locust Fork News-Journal is read by an average of about 212,000 unique visitors a month, generating about 412,000 page views and more than a half a million hits. Get onboard the hit boat! Promote your organization or company here.
If all of this interests you but sounds like jibber jabber, please e-mail editor and publisher Glynn Wilson at fast2write@charter.net, or call 205-960-3639.
During the Bush years, we specialized in covering the politicization of the U.S. justice system as much as any news organization. Our archives are about the most comprehensive for anyone researching the prosecution of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, and the original case against Richard Scrushy, which Glynn Wilson covered for The New York Times.
