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Photo by Serafina Frederick / Hosting and moderating 15 public candidate debates in 2012 was among myriad responsibilities for Henry Frederick, editor and publisher of Headline Surfer, the 24/7 Internet newspaper.NEW SMYRNA BEACH -- People ask me all the time why I make so many personal and financial sacrifices to report the news in this electronic medium called the Internet. After all, it's a challenge being a one-man band writing stories and selling ads.
Those who know me understand that I believe in the sanctity of journalism and it's really the only thing I know how to do that I truly enjoy. And with print media's slow death, I had to find a way to re-invent myself after more than 20 years of reporting for daily newspapers.
It all started at the age of 3, when I learned how to read. By the time I was in first grade, I saw a three-story building in the downtown on fire and snuck away from recess to ask the cops what happened. And I while the cop re-routing traffic kept saying, "Beat it kid!" I kept firing away questions until he gave me a few details to get rid of me.
By the age of 6, I was already reading encyclopedias, dictionaries, almanacs and history books. While classmates were describing their collection of Barbie dolls and Match Box cars in show-and-tell, I was giving summaries of the Tet Offensive, the assassinations of MLK and Bobby Kennedy and the rioting outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Otherwise, I never spoke.
My first grade teacher, Miss Brown, actually, told me to hold up while she ran to the principal after I began talking about Sharon Tate and the Manson murders. The kids, as you could imagine, didn't know how to take any of this.
I remember the principal escorting me to his office, lifting me up to sit on the edge of his desk and giving me his tuna sandwich while asking me how or why I knew so much, especially because the teacher had to wake me on more than one occasion.
I explained that I was interested in Vietnam because my uncle was in DaNang and I watched the CBS News with Walter Cronkite religiously and that got me wanting to read the newspaper in the morning for more details. My parents may not have been aware, but I confided to the principal that I snuck out of bed at night to watch my two favorite TV shows: "Mannix" and the "Invaders."
By the time I was in third grade I had read the King James version of the Holy Bible, Jack London's "Call of the Wild" and Stephen Crane's "The Red Badge of Courage." I barely ever talked and was a loner. I was puny and had asthma, which, suffice to say, resulted in getting beat up a lot on the playground.
For some reason, the other children took a great liking to nailing me in dodge ball. But when I won the school spelling bee, everyone wanted to be my friend.
When I was in sixth grade, I educated teachers who really had no clue what Watergate was really all about. In seventh grade, I did a major bulletin board photo collage from Time and Newsweek on the fall of Saigon. I also wrote a 300-page paper to go with it on Western imperialism by the British and French and why America had followed the same failed policies.
All my classmates used to fight over who would be on my teams on Fridays for the Current Events Q&A, with the class divided into three groups. Typically, the final score would be something like 10 - 0 - 5,000. I never lost.
The guidance counselor had a specialist come in to administer an IQ test. The result was 165. By the start of high school, I started skipping school quite a bit, for two reasons: 1) I got beat up a lot and 2) I found solace in the town library. By the start of my junior year, I had read many of Shakespeare's works and every American and British Literature book I could get my hands on. Even a couple of classmates who picked on me for years, finally left me alone after I did an oral book report on Edgar Allen Poe's, "The Pit and the Pendulum."
I wrote for the town newspaper in high school and even interviewed then-Congressman Christopher Dodd in his during a class trip to Washington. My favorite place was President Kennedy's gravesite.
Then I was off to college where I discovered women, had a double major, cleaned toilets in the dorm and ran the college newspaper, during which I interviewed former presidents Ford and Carter as well as rocker Bill Idol. After graduating with top honors and receiving the "President's Citation," I stuck around for a few graduate classes and started my own college paper, selling ads to support it. No one else had ever done that nor have they since.
So I stick with what works for me. I had won more than my share of awards over the years in journalism, not because I was smarter than everyone else, but because I was curious and asked a lot of questions.
April 7 will mark the fifth anniversary since I started this 24/7 Internet newspaper from scratch, building the custom website with no prior knowledge of the software, but I asked a lot of questions and I learned. As a result I created Florida's very first daily Internet newspaper (without newsprint, cable or broadcast TV or radio as the main frame). The late Peter Mallory helped me financially to get it off the ground.
With the help of my wife, Serafina, and a dozen or so community bloggers, I've stayed with it. Aside from the four big Florida Press Club awards in 2012, and getting it integrated with the Google News Directories, I've managed to provide for my wife and my son, who is now 19, and ready for college.
I had hoped the elected officials and those connected with them would embrace and respect what we have done to enhance New Smyrna Beach as a family tourist destination, but we ran into a political buzz saw where city CRA and hospital indigent care taxpayer funding was tied in with the weekly and daily papers. And while tens of thousands of dollars were doled out to them, the most we ever got was a lousy $680 from Bert Fish hospital. And we had to wait two years for the check. By comparison, the weekly Observer, got in excess of $50,000.
I remember walking out of the city commission meeting in September 2011, after pleading with the elected officials to include us in the advertising, and of the $250,000-plus doled out, we never got a cent. Not a penny.
On April 7, we will have celebrated five years of day in and day out coverage of this community -- more than 2,000 videos, 20,000 story postings and 100,000 photos. Every home football Cudas game, every July 4 fireworks show, the last three high school graduations and 17 public candidate debates -- two in 2009 and 15 in 2012.
We were the only media outlet excluded from the Southeast Volusia Chamber of Commerce as a media sponsor while such opportunity was afforded the News-Journal, the Observer, Hometown News, WSBB, even the Pennysaver.
The CRA and the Southeast Volusia Advertising Authority, along with the chamber, were tied into an organized network and we weren't wanted.
Two months after this Internet newspaper was launched as NSBNews.net, the News-Journal closed all of its bureaus, including the Canal Street locale. Less than a month later, the Observer folded.
There was active recruitment discouraging businesses not to advertise with us. The city hired a public relations flak with CRA funding and she was actually paid with taxpayer dollars to work on the advertising and marketing of the Observer. Eventually, she too, actively advised businesses to discontinue advertising with us.
Just a week ago, this PR. person was hired permanently on a part-time basis at $52,000 to peddle press releases for the so-called Loop. Last year the city celebrated its $125th anniversary by doling out several thousand for advertising and we were the only media outlet excluded.
We left the chamber last year and joined Daytona's instead, having paid more than a thousand bucks in membership fees and advertising in its annual directory. During the 2012 primary, the then-chamber president urged County Council candidate to pull his advertising from our site if he expected to get her support. He didn't.
Even after that, I made a personal appearance at an Edgewater City Council meeting encouraging Kennedy and his elected colleagues not to go through with his possible ending of the $10,000 the chamber had been getting from the city.
There was nothing in it for me, except to show I understood the need for partnerships. And even before this immediate past president, the previous chamber president represented the legal interests of Robert Lott, who, along with his wife, sought and received bankruptcy protection from a slew of creditors for the Observer. Among them were two elderly widows collectively out of $110,000, the developers of the Hampton Inn for another $46,000 and so on.
After that September 2011 city commission meeting, Mayor Adam Barringer, whom we endorsed for office in 2009, turned his back and gave up the "Mayor's Message" blog we had given him. Earlier in 2012, during then County Chair Frank Bruno's State of the County address the mayor threw a cloth napkin with spaghetti sauce on it in my face when I tried to take a photo of him. I folded the napkin in front of him and walked away.
When my friend, Peter Mallory died last June, Barringer made nice with us and I was foolish into thinking he'd keep his word in finally including our Internet newspaper in the city's advertising. Then again, his good friend, Jim Hathaway was running for county council.
But after involving his elected office with a private retirement dinner for retired Commissioner Hathaway after he lost the election, I made it clear to him I couldn't allow him to continue submitting a blog. This also was after he had taken care of his boyhood friend, Dave Fernandez, with a lavish CRA grant for his Trader's bar in late October and had another friend, Steve Sather, appointed to the planning board just before the election, who admitted in open court 20 years earlier to trying to purchase a large quantity of cocaine from an undercover cop.
And it's funny now how Mayor Barringer is going around telling anyone who will listen how we're picking on him because he won't advertise with us.
But he has selective memory in how we reported the planning fiasco the very same day he was convening his economic development advisory board. He forgets the large payout the former chief planner Mark Rakowski got after the fiasco led to the halting and delay of the Walmart and the Hampton Inn or the driving with an open container arrest for former CRA Director Kevin Fall, who quit rather than attend counseling ordered by the city manager.
Then there was Barringer's initial scandal where he helped get friend Chad Schilsky on the CRA board and got his family's construction business involved in a grant for Schilsky's restaurant before Schilsky ended up being forced to pay the improvements out of his own pocket because the funding was illegal, including the construction costs for the Barringer business.
And during the city's Christmas parade, it was Barringer who used a sexual reference in addressing a rookie cop when he wouldn't let him take a short cut through a closed off side street. That story will be posted today. In it you'll learn two shocking details.
It's not about ignoring the news for the sake of advertising. There's been more than enough of that with the print newspapers.
Though we are struggling to survive in an environment where elected politicians, overpaid municipal administrators and greedy business insiders with their hands on taxpayer supported CRA funds, we refuse to sell out the journalism.
Our mission will continue. We won all of these awards in 2012, because we provided a public service to the people of New Smyrna Beach and to Volusia County. The truth will win out. It always will, regardless of the press releases and phony marketing schemes perpetuated from City Hall.
They can put on their shiny yellow plastic "Loop" construction hats and mug it up for the cameras for the CRA ribbon cuttings. After all, the CRA dollars continue to flow. But for how long? And what elected county official is going to approve new CRA districts with all of the adverse publicity with taxpayer money heaped on the bars and the hundreds of thousands wasted on after-dark, alcohol-fueled street parties, all in the name of economic development.
Print media will report the municipal "press releases" as legitimate stories, after all, they're getting advertising.
We'll continue covering the Cudas home football games, the high school graduations, the July 4 fireworks, the elections and so on.
We've got the medium to get the news trending on the search engines and news directories of Google, Bing and Yahoo. Now we have to re-double our efforts to generate revenue to support our family and continue our public service of reporting the news.
The hornet's nest we walked into in April 2008, hasn't changed, even if some of the players have, but once we've connected the dots and the full story has been told of what has occurred over the last five years, we're more than confident the major authorities will finally take notice and clean it up. After all, the Internet media is the window to the public getting their news here and around the world.