We have reached a milestone -- 25,000 hits. And so our thanks go out to all of you who have gone online and typed in NSBNEWS.net since we made our launch April 11. We hope that you are enjoying the local news coverage and the wire stories for national and world news, sports and Hollywood -- all constantly updated.
While print media continues to struggle, there are many growth opportunities here in cyber space.
It just goes to show that you don't need to be a millionaire to produce a news product. All you need is competent journalism experience, the Internet and a will to succeed.
The News-Journal and the Orlando Sentinel did a story on the closing of The Observer, the weekly newsprint publication that closed for good earlier this month.
The Sentinel, to its credit, reached out to me for a comment about the Observer's closing since I was its editor for seven months until last July, when it was converted from a daily newspaper to an inane weekly. I was against that conversion, but the out-of-state owners didn't care what I had to say and the paper died.
The Observer's closing begs the question: How long can news-print publications like the News-Journal continue ignoring the Internet and count on that aging and shrinking Baby Boomer population to buy their newspaper?
The News-Journal can continue to put out a three-day regional publication called "The Daily Journal" and pretend they are giving the readers here daily local coverage, but they are not. There's a reason why we have 25,000 hits. Because people want the local news the Mighty Metro is not giving them.
Readers learned about state funding for the widening of 10th Street in New Smyrna Beach last Saturday in NSBNews.net. At 5 p.m. today, we posted a story for Southeast Volusia readers about 10 drug-related arrests that were carried out by a multi-force law enforcement effort led by the Volusia County Sheriff's Office with assistance from New Smyrna Beach police.
Getting the news out is hard work, but knowing it is being read is very rewarding. Please keep those hits coming.