What a great feeling it was to watch the 11 p.m. news and then even force myself to go to the store and look at the huge stack of newspapers on the shelves to see how the supposed "big boys" scrambled to catch up with a little website's breaking investigative news story: In this case, the major scandal in the Oak Hill police force.
The story was thrust into the public spotlight by NSBNEWS.net after a 36-hour push, including acquisition of public records, quotes and other news-gathering elements.
For one day, at least, I got to shine like I did for nearly a decade at the News-Journal where a cop reporter's daily investigative journalism was encouraged and appreciated. Those days are long gone. The medium has changed. Newspapers as we Babyboomers grew up with, are dying. But the public's thirst for the news can't be quenched fast enough, especially in a 21st-century world.
It's amazing how the big boys scrambled at the 11th hour, desperate for some kind of sound bite, quote or factoid that had not gone uncovered. Sorry, big boys. I had all those details wrapped up, posted online and saturated through the the Internet's social media outlets, including Google News, Facebook, Twitter and our own network of e-mail media alerts.
There were a lot of laughs when I started NSBNEWS.net from scratch with a little funding help from my dear friend, Peter Mallory. At that time, I also met my loving wife, Sera, with a strong talent for videos and online graphics. Together, we enlisted the help of a talented webmaster in Utah, Jed Brown. In April 2008, my dream was born with NSBNEWS.net and my journalism career allowed to continue here at home.
Then there were the community bloggers: Darlene Vann, Budd Neviaser, Gerry Tatham, Patricia Miller, Dr. Rick Martorano and Michael Visconti.
For a while there were bloggers Styron James, Col. Irving Davidoff, Catherine Forrester and Tia McDonald. Then others came into the blogging picture: Joe Glasse, Kerry-Anne Purkiss, Marilee Walters, Palmer Wilson and Jeanette DiCara. Soon, we had a couple of teenagers, Angel Marie and Cheyenne Drews; and a young man in Matthew Wall.
Still more were signed up: Shane Porter, Ellen Darden, Stan Escudero, Samantha Bishop, State Rep. Dorothy Hukill, Roxanne Reynolds Hicks; and soon to premiere, Shira Beth Wild, Margie Patchett and Bill Roe.
Mark Williams, a former local radio personality, and I began the process of sharing stories with my website and his: halifaxareanewswatch.com. And Dale Smith, a print journalism reporter, was added as well as a contributing writer.
The labor of love for journalism grew out of my childhood fascination of Watergate and Vietnam, to my teen years writing for the community weekly. Then came the four years of college as campus reporter and then editor, the first weekly reporter job for a year, the first small daily newspaper reporter slot for two years, then the big break for a suburban metro in New York for eight years, and finally, Daytona Beach for another eight years.
Along the way came the big stories with the bold headlines. Several thousand stories in Connecticut, New York and Florida. The experiences and daily reporting helped refine the writing, interviewing and essential news gathering techniques. Breaking news and in-depth reporting became my strengths, all from that inner curiosity to report not only what is happening, but why as well. Sometimes it's obvious. Often times, not so obvious and even bizarre. Witnessing and reporting on the execution of serial killer Aileen Wuornos goes in the latter category.
Stories like Wuornos, Angel Garner, Stanley Quaggin, the Trull Brothers, the Farinas, life in Spring Hill, Dale Earnhardt's autopsy, NASCAR's tracks, were all part of a daily metro reporter's experience and drive that resulted in major journalism awards, the foundation for a career and life here in Volusia County.
Invariably, nothing stays the same, as we've witnessed with Daytona's newspaper and its "replacement editors and reporters" while excellent journalists were shown the door for a fire-sale ownership change. Hundreds of people lost their jobs with my family directly impacted. I was already gone from the paper before the mass layoffs, commuting to and from Massachusetts as a city editor at a small daily for nearly two years. Many hard-working journalists had to move away in hopes of keeping their careers alive while others lost theirs altogether.
There were scores of two-income households dependent on their News-Journal salaries to feed their families, who, to this day, deal with the fact that their employer dumped their husband or wife, that the bureaus in New Smyrna Beach, Orange City, DeLand, Bunnell and Tallahassee are a distant memory. Those who were let go not only had to deal with the humiliation of losing their jobs, but also seeing their meager pensions compromised.
Suffice to say, the Daytona paper under new ownership, is what it is.
I had to laugh earlier this month when a couple of these punk replacement reporters e-mailed me the beginning of the new year, whining that I was stealing their stories. These same so-called reporters decided they would go to the jail and get the accused New Year's day killer to talk to them. Of course, he didn't, and after wasting their own time with a barrage of e-mails to me, missed his first court appearance. And of course, these replacement reporters were clueless to a few details, such as the homicide scene being caught on video surveillance.
Other than a jail mugshot and a grainy photo of the victim, they had no visual presentation of those involved. Of course, any reporter worth his salt knows in our digital world, you can get what you need on social networks like Facebook. You can even get clues to a person caught up in tragedy by what they post on their Facebook profiles. For example, the accused killer, who shot and killed his estranged wife's friend, described his marital relationship as "complicated."
Even more significant, these replacement reporters and their colleagues had no luck with the accused gunman's estranged wife. She gave me an interview. No problem. I haven't gotten any e-mails since from these wannabes. Of course, their e-mails paled to the profanity-laced nasty and threatening one I received last year by a night editor who still works there. That one is on file with the New Smyrna Beach police and a matter of public record.
And here we are today, with media coverage from these big boys, where a day later, all they had to work with was a document, which I had long since posted and some no comments from a couple of officials. Of course, they didn't have the real newsmakers with real quotes sewn into the kind of journalism reports the public hungers for.
These days, newspaper reporting boils down to who can get out the first cop press release where most of the basics are pre-packaged by the designated "PIO" like the frenzy over the South Daytona purse snatching and Monday's homicide in DeLand.
It takes real reporting to secure documents and to get the newsmakers to go on the record so the public can really understand why the story is worth reporting in the first place.
That's where experience, trust and respect play a big part in breaking major stories. Advertising and marketing agreements make it easier for promotion to be passed off as news. This is especially true when those in the public eye have their hands on the taxpayers' money and then take more taxpayer money to replenish those stiffed because of mismanagement or ineptness.The American Music Festival comes to mind.
The Oak Hill story is not the first major story broken by NSBNEWS.net and it won't be the last. As long as we continue to push hard to get the private marketplace to understand and invest in this little website, we will grow and provide even more journalism that really matters. Those government-generated press releases and big corporation marketing press releases that clog up the e-mail folder will always be there.
NSBNEWS.net, a 2 -or-1 website with VolusiaNews.net as another portal, is no threat to the big boys. Or are we? After all, this is where journalism lives.