It doesn’t seem to be online yet but if you go out and get an early copy of the Seattle Times Sunday edition, columnist Danny Westneat has written up the results of an long conversation he had with your editor here after he called us up a couple days ago and said he wanted to talk to us about WSB. It’s mostly accurate and we very much appreciate the Times’ interest in writing about what we’re doing as a hyperlocal news website (which would be impossible to run without your help, support, tips, photos, etc.). However, there is one incorrect and, we feel, unnecessarily inflammatory aspect of what he wrote that we want to go on the record about, even before much of anybody else even sees his column.
He wrote that we “are gunning for the (WS) Herald’s advertisers” and described the co-existence of WSB and WSH here in Seattle’s largest neighborhood as a “news war.” Incorrect and untrue on both counts. We’re not “gunning for” anything or anybody, did not tell him we were, nor did we say or even imply we are in a “war.”
Trust us, we know what an actual “news war” is like, having worked (until just last month) for almost 15 years in Seattle TV news, where four stations compete tooth-and-nail, watching each other like a hawk to see who’s got what and what can be labeled as “exclusive,” “first on…,” etc. Nothing like that going on here. Yes, we read the Herald. When their paper comes out every week, we take a look to see if we missed anything big, but on the flip side, we suspect they don’t pay much attention to us at all; their editor wrote an editorial recently describing blogs as something “fun” where “facts often take little part of the mix,” so when we saw that, since it doesn’t characterize this blog at all, we wondered if he’d ever read WSB.
Back to Danny Westneat. When — deep into our hourlong conversation — he brought up the subject of West Seattle having a weekly newspaper as well as a hyperlocal daily news site, we took great pains to say that we think there is plenty of room for (at least) two thriving news sources here, both presenting lots of unique material. If you look at their site and ours, there are stories you will find there that you won’t find here, and vice versa. Same with the advertisers. Last time we saw a count somewhere, West Seattle had more than 300 businesses. Right now, WSB has a grand total of 10 advertisers; haven’t counted the number in the paper and on their site lately, but the sum total is almost certainly many, many more. We are not “gunning for” anyone else’s advertisers. Here’s how our ad-sales process works: Our sales guy Patrick spends his day meeting with business owners in the community (and answering e-mails from people who contact us to inquire), he shows them what we have to offer in terms of ad placement (a lot less ad space than a newspaper, for what it’s worth), tells them the number of people who visit our site daily, talks with them about their needs and interests and questions — as any ad salesperson does — and then they make their own decision about whether they think spending some of their hard-earned money for an ad on WSB is something that can help their business grow. That’s the same decision those same businesspeople make regarding all the other advertising opportunities in the community — including the Herald’s paper and web versions, the directory books, the coupons that come in the mail, sponsorships of community organizations and events, citywide papers and broadcasting outlets, etc. Some choose to advertise in multiple places. Us offering local businesspeople another West Seattle-only advertising option does not constitute “gunning for” anything or anyone.
Last word on the Times column: Westneat sent us a note yesterday, a day after we had spoken, saying he had decided to write the column for this weekend’s paper because something else fell through and said that one of the points he planned to make was that he thought we were a “serious competitor” for the Herald; we tried to correct him ahead of time, by e-mailing back this:
Just one point of context – “serious competitor for the West Seattle Herald” is certainly subjective. They’ve been in this community for 85 years, we’ve been writing about West Seattle for 2 years. They print a newspaper every week; we just do a website. …
However, he decided to take that angle anyway, so we want to at least get the context out here on our site. With a disclosure – in the early months of WSB, we did criticize the paper a couple times. WSB was more of a standard opinion blog back then, with daily readership in the dozens instead of the thousands. But as we have written here before, especially starting with the December 2006 windstorm, everything changed, and spouting our opinions publicly isn’t what this site is about any more. For our part of it — you provide the discussion and opinion, in comments and forums, not us — it’s just the facts. In fact, that’s the headline you will see on Westneat’s column about us if you read it — “An Appetite for Just the Facts.” Which is why we’re writing this, to offer a factual correction of one aspect of a column that otherwise is pretty cool (we’ll put up the link whenever it appears online) – and to again thank you for your support — Tracy Record, WSB editor/co-publisher
(12:05 AM SUNDAY UPDATE: The column still isn’t online, and we’re going off-duty for a while. We’re guessing a link will eventually appear here. 8:50 AM SUNDAY UPDATE: Here’s the direct link. And 2 more notes, for what it’s worth, after re-reading: First, re: the line that we “report getting twice as many pageviews per day as the Herald.” I have no idea what their traffic is. He asked me what ours is and I told him, without any speculation or claims about how we thought that related to anything or anyone; any info he had regarding theirs would have come directly from them. Second, I was assistant news director at Q13, not news director. The latter position is Captain Picard; mine was Commander Riker.)
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