Archive for GoUpstate.com

A little good news, journalistically speaking

Posted in Internet, Journalism with tags , , , , , on January 7, 2010 by macmystery

When I started this blog in the summer of 2008 when I was at the Maynard Summer Editing Program at the University of Nevada in Reno, Nev., the general idea was that I would write about being a father and being a journalist.

Obviously, you can look down my list of posts and know I haven’t stuck to the format.

Writing about the kids is one thing, but when it comes to journalism, there hasn’t been a lot of good news to write about.

But in the past two-and-a-half months or so, there have been two nuggets of pretty good news — one for the paper as a whole and one for the sports section.

At the end of October, the now-defunct Editor & Publisher reported (Read our story here) that the Herald-Journal’s combined print and online circulation had grown 10.9 percent in the previous year. That percentage represented the fourth biggest growth nationally, behind only Luzerne County Newspapers in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., (14.6 percent), The (Greensburg, Pa.) Tribune-Review (13.6) and the Tampa (Fla.) Tribune (11.4).

Then, just before Christmas, the Associated Press Sports Editors named GoUpstate.com a Top 10 sports Web site (Read here) for newspapers with fewer than 1 million unique visitors.

Of course, neither of these guarantees that my job won’t go away next week, next month or next year. But a little good news is better than none.