The editor of The Daily Progress, Reynolds Hutchins, published a column today attempting to justify why Virginia taxpayers need to continue wasting money to publish public notices in legacy newspapers, noting that the reach of the Progress and its sister publications in Virginia under the Lee Enterprises umbrella is “unmatched.”
In the process, he made the mistake of humble-bragging about numbers, noting that the Lee papers serving seven Virginia markets delivered 510,000 print copies last month, and that “local articles on our websites in nine Virginia markets drew more than 657,000 pageviews in the latest full month reported.”
You’ll see the mistake in a sec, as I try my hand at this humble-bragging thing.
AFP doesn’t do print – it’s costly, and a loss leader, not to mention, terribly environmentally unfriendly – but we do have a website.
A single one.
Which, in our one Virginia market, drew, per our Google Analytics data, 695,818 page views last month.
That ain’t a bad number, is it, for a mom-and-pop – based out of a home office in Waynesboro, two full-timers plus a staff of stringers?
Asking for a friend.
And we’re not out here begging for public tax dollars to prop up our operation.
When somebody in local or state government asks us if we can highlight an important public hearing, we just do it, because that’s what we think we’re supposed to do.
And when, for example, the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality tries to get away with running a print public notice ad in The News Virginian – one of those Lee Enterprises papers, with a print circulation of 692, per data from the Virginia Press Association – to get the word out about a public-comment period on a local company’s request for a hazardous pollution permit, we’re the ones who had to come in, after locals protested that no one had heard about the comment period, because no one reads the local paper anymore, to get DEQ to, initially, extend the comment period, then follow up with a real live public hearing.
The News Virginian couldn’t step in and clean up its own mess there, because Lee laid off its last remaining full-time reporter at the NV a year ago.
The person that Lee laid off, Bob Stuart, incidentally, is the author of the story on a trial of a local home builder in Augusta County scheduled for next week that is, at the moment that I’m writing this, the top story on the front page of AFP.
A bean-counter out in Davenport, Iowa, which is where Lee Enterprises is headquartered, decided that local readers in our home market didn’t need even just one dedicated full-time reporter to keep up with the goings-on in our two cities and county with a combined population of 130,000, and left it to somebody else – the bean-counter didn’t care who – to pick up the slack.
Good news, the people picking up the slack seem to know what they’re doing, given that they’ve obviously figured out a way to outpace the web traffic of the big company with papers in nine local markets in Virginia all by their little old selves.
What I wouldn’t give to have even a sliver of the resources that even just The Progress, which has a staff, per its website, of two editors, six full-time reporters and a photographer, has at its disposal.
And we still beat them, on the regular, on the important stories of the day.
But they beat us on getting public money to pay their bills.
I’ll give ’em that.
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Chris Graham
