| September 5, 2008
The Island Free Press celebrates its first anniversary
with more readers, more content, and more advertisers With a slide show of the pictures of the year  On Wednesday, Sept. 5, of last year, The Island Free Press made its debut online. The news story that we were covering on that day was the approach of Tropical Storm Gabrielle. Ironically, a year later on this first anniversary, we are covering the approach of another storm – Hanna. In fact, we are looking at Hanna, Ike, and Josephine, all lined up across the Atlantic and heading this way – at least for now. We hope we will be as fortunate as we were with Gabrielle. That storm made landfall near Cape Lookout on Saturday, Sept. 8, with winds of 50 mph. On Hatteras and Ocracoke, it was basically a non-event. The highest wind gust officially clocked at Billy Mitchell airfield in Frisco was 53 mph. At Hatteras Inlet, there was a gust of 61 mph. Only about a quarter inch of rain fell. The ferries stopped running for a while, but there was no evacuation of either island. We were thrilled to be providing Hatteras and Ocracoke residents and other readers around the country news about the storm in daily updates. And up-to-date news is what has driven the readership of The Island Free Press. Those of you who have read The Island Free Press for the past year know that I have written that Internet publishing has changed the way that I view journalism, especially in an area as small as ours where readers are not used to daily updates from the local media. And, as I first wrote in a progress report six weeks after the Free Press went online, I am struck by how “diverse” our community is. This newspaper targets a specific geographic area – Hatteras and Ocracoke islands. But, more important, it brings together a community of people who live here, who used to live here and are now spread around the world, and who don’t live here but visit whenever they can because they love this seashore and its villages and perhaps want to live here one day. All of us have a vested interest in preserving the past, illuminating the present, and shaping the future of Hatteras and Ocracoke. On this first anniversary, we want to thank everyone in our island communities and our extended community of island lovers for the support they have shown this newspaper. Since Sept. 5, we have had more than 675,000 visits to this Web site. We had more than 2,000 visitors the second day we were online, but then visitors dropped below 1,000 a day for a few months. We slowly and steadily climbed in visitors and peaked with 104,000 in April, the month that a consent decree settled a contentious lawsuit over ORV access on the Cape Hatteras National Seashore beaches. We were astounded by that response. Last November, we had an “e-mail alert” list of 600 people. Today, we are approaching 2,000. Our readers come from all across the United States and several foreign countries. We estimate that about 75 percent of our regular readers do not live on the Outer Banks, but visit here regularly. Many of them are faithful correspondents with the Free Press, another reason I just love Internet publishing. Our readers don’t write “Dear Editor,” they write “Dear Irene.” They send us a steady stream of letters that went on for about 20 pages for weeks last spring during the legal fight for ORV access on the seashore. They keep those letters coming, for which we are grateful. Many of our new readers have come to our Web site to learn about beach access and read commentary, guest columns, letters, and articles about our story of the year – and to view the photos of closed beaches, fencing and signs, and disappointed locals and visitors. (All of these articles are still available on the Beach Access Issues category page and in the archive at the bottom of that page.) We are proud to say that The Island Free Press has become THE place for islanders and visitors to go to find out more about access issues. We have been recommended on dozens of Web sites and by many island business people who get questions day after day from visitors about the issue and what it means for them. We are grateful for this support and will make coverage of access issues a priority in our second year. We are also grateful for the advertising support that businesses on and off the islands have given us in our first year. They have provided us the funds to launch this newspaper and continue to bring news, features, and terrific photos to our readers. And we hope our readers will support these advertisers by clicking on their ads to see what they have to offer and by patronizing them. We hope that in the coming year, more businesses will support us so that we can extend our newsgathering efforts. Our advertising motto this year is “Support the newspaper that supports your issues.” As we looked back on the year and talked about what we could do differently, we looked at the ads, which were being overwhelmed by the large amount of editorial content on the Web site. That is not a problem that we ever thought we would have a year ago! We had no idea that we and our contributors could possibly produce as much content as we have. So, it only made sense to make the ads larger, which is what you will notice on the Web site today. And, in addition to staying with the current year’s pricing on ads, we will offer advertisers who sign for a year with us by Dec. 1, an ad at no cost in our Guide to Hatteras and Ocracoke brochure. We’ll print 20,000 copies of the brochure and distribute them from Easter to Labor Day on the Outer Banks – at Visitor Centers and businesses. We are confident that businesses on and off the island will be pleased with our visitor numbers and our ever increasing presence on search engines. If you are interested in advertising, you can click on The Island Free Press ad on the front page for more information. My partners in this venture into online publishing are Donna Barnett, graphic designer and Web master, and Evan Ferguson, the advertising sales manager. We are happy and humbled that we have had so much support from readers and advertisers and from friends who were informal advisers. And we are grateful to the writers, columnists, photographers, and readers who have contributed their talents to our newspaper. And we must again thank Jim Boyd and Buddy Swain of Hatteras Designs, Inc., -- without them we never would have embarked on this journey and stayed on course. As we conclude and celebrate this first year of The Island Free Press, we give you our view of the past year in pictures. They are pictures that have appeared in the newspaper and were taken by a talented group of photographers. Foremost among them are Don Bowers, Daniel Pullen and Buddy Swain. Our writers, contributors, and readers took other photos. These are pictures of the events that shaped this year’s issues, of the beautiful landscapes and sunsets of our islands, and faces of the people who live here and visit us – anglers, commercial fishermen, basketball players, high school graduates, and youngsters. They are photos of island celebrations from Halloween to July 4 and from Christmas to Old Christmas, an old island tradition. We want our newspaper to be a marketplace of ideas. We aim to be the best year-round newspaper on Hatteras and Ocracoke islands with real news and lots of articles to talk about, to inform you, to tell you about our past, and to make you contemplate our future. Thanks to all of you for making this past year such a joyous journey. Click Here To View Slideshow |
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