I was originally going to put this at the tail end of the last post but wrote enough to determine that it should stand alone. Tonight I’ll get to the General Assembly items.
I’ve noticed over the last week or two that Joe Albero has added a number of co-contributors to his site to cover other perspectives and topic areas, which to me seems loosely based on the model of Red Maryland he had a problem with a couple months back. Maybe he’s come to the conclusion that you can’t easily serve the twin masters of multiple daily postings and good content being a one-person operation. Certainly it can get to be a grind. While there are times I report on political events and do my best impersonation of a true journalist, in general I work from the latter idea of having one daily post of commentary while more often than not Joe’s way of doing business was multiple daily posts – with mixed results.
We all know that Joe is a rather controversial fellow, sometimes giving all of us local bloggers who take our time and try to present facts and cogent arguments supporting our point of view a bad name. (Almost 18 months on I’m still unhappy about us bloggers being called a “cancer” by Ron Alessi. It wasn’t anything I said but I was lumped in anyway.) On the other hand, there’s no denying Joe’s worked to place major news stories in the limelight, something the mainstream media couldn’t or wouldn’t take the time to cover. (And in no small part thanks to him, we bloggers now are part of mainstream media, i.e. Channel 47’s website. Credit where credit is due.) So it will be interesting over the next weeks and months to see how well the arrangement works for all involved. Personally I do like the added sports coverage – will you be covering the Shorebirds as well, Nick?
So what color is Salisbury News? If you go by the political commentators you’d have to say red but if you listen to his detractors the choice would be yellow (as in yellow journalism.) And since he has no advertisers at the moment, I guess it can’t be green. Maybe it’s black and white because of the frequent posting of law enforcement press releases, or sepia because that’s what the “one year ago” posts remind me of, old historic pictures.
I guess I’ll put it in black on a sort of light gray, since that’s the colors I use. Joe has the potential to make his a solid local news source, but there needs to be some organization done with it and I’m not sure he can do it with the limitations of his Blogger-based site. A good first step would be adopting categories as I have. It would also be nice to have the contributor’s name up top at each article, which should be as easy as selecting a different template. (One caveat – I admit my Blogger knowledge is lacking now since I haven’t changed a template there in awhile.) And hey, since you have sports why not weather too? Hopefully this is all taken as constructive criticism.
And before I get a long comment on the next subject from Joe (which wouldn’t get through moderation until I get home anyway since I wrote this last night), yes I was asked to be a Salisbury News contributor awhile back but I prefer the arrangement I have now with Red Maryland because while there’s multiple contributors and posts that mean my items won’t be in the lead spot too long, at least all the posts are within a related topic field.
Further, while Joe’s site emphasizes area items I generally don’t unless it’s a political event, local music, or my Shorebird of the Week. And I guess I like knowing those readers that I do get here come by honestly for the most part. I get some readers from Red Maryland but I have a lot of regulars too, some of whom come here after they check out Salisbury News.
But I’m going to close this out with something Joe or any other contributor to Salisbury News is welcome to take advantage of, along with all of my other local peers. This coming Sunday I’ll once again play host to the Carnival of Maryland, which begins year number 2 with its 27th edition. I’d love to see a lot of Eastern Shore participation since we do well on the political end of things in Maryland but maybe aren’t as well known for some of the other outstanding writing done locally. It’s easy to contribute, just fill out the form here. Ideally I’ll have 10-15 contributions by Saturday afternoon when I write up the post with the links.
