This article is about why there are sometimes delays in the reporting of News on the Barrington Town News website.
We realize that you may be wondering why there isn’t consistent daily news provided on this website, which is why we are writing this article. There are several reasons for this, including delays from sources getting back to us, volunteer understaffing, and a limited number of newsworthy stories that we’re made aware of. Our news service is a public service, and although we need advertising revenue to offset our expenses of providing this service, there are a lot of things that you can do that don’t involve spending money to help support our community’s newspaper.
Barrington Town News is only coming to the end of its first month in business, and we’ve already completed 27 news articles – nearly 1 per day. We took over-reporting the news in Barrington during a time that the parent company of Foster’s has cut resources to cover Barrington. Some of us didn’t even know how to write news articles when we started volunteering for this project. The important thing to mention is that it’s time to start investing in our local community newspaper through interacting with it more, through becoming more involved with it and to encourage businesses in the community to advertise with us so that we are not in the red financially.
Patrick R. McElhiney has invested thousands of dollars into this company, and he’s not going to allow it to fail. We are just in the situation that it’s taking many, many times to convince people to advertise with us, while during the same time that it takes to convince advertisers we are incurring more and more debt. Since we are not yet paying our writers, the costs could have been much greater. We really need the community’s support to keep the news service going.
Delays from Sources Getting Back to Us
Since we are a new online newspaper, the urgency for the public to respond promptly just hasn’t developed yet. Most people that we are reaching out to either haven’t heard of us before, or they’ve only just learned of us recently. Developing our stories relies on sources getting back to us with details that we request. While we usually have at least 20 stories we are working on at any given time, it still takes a lot of time to get the information back from our sources.
One recent example is the Phil’s Restaurant article that we are working on. We still have 2-3 more people that we need to talk to, already having over 20 pages of notes gathered, just because there is so much to the story. It’s probably going to take another week to two weeks to complete this article alone. While we will be working on other articles in the meantime, they may also have similar delays.
How Can We Help?
If you’re interested in helping us with regards to our delays from sources getting back to us, there are several things that you could do:
- Respond Promptly – if you’re a source for an article, please respond promptly. The faster you respond to our inquiries, the faster we will be able to provide the news to the public.
- Word of Mouth – if you’re talking about our business, you can mention to anyone you know that we need to create an urgency around Barrington Town News regarding responses from the public. This doesn’t just mean that sources will respond promptly, but also that everyone will play a role in the newspaper so that it’s successful.
- Become a Writer – if you help us write articles for Barrington Town News, you’ll be helping us with the most important aspect of our business – which is content creation. The more articles we can work on at the same time, the more Evergreen content we’ll have to fill in time periods that take longer to get responses from sources for major stories.
Volunteer Understaffing
We really need more writers to be able to provide a consistent stream of news to the public. Our current volunteers do a good job, but we can’t really apply pressure on them, because they are volunteers. Once we have steady streams of revenue from advertising, we will be able to demand more from our staff members, because we will be able to pay them.
While Patrick R. McElhiney, the founder of Barrington Town News works around 40 hours a week on this business, the other volunteers usually, have less time to work because they have other lives outside of Barrington Town News – such as businesses they need to manage, mortgages they need to pay. Patrick also manages the Facebook page, in which he shares hundreds of posts from the community every week to the Barrington Town News Facebook page.
How Can We Help?
If you’re interested in helping us with regards to our volunteer understaffing, there are several things that you could do:
- Become a Writer – if you help us write articles for Barrington Town News, you’ll be helping us with the most important aspect of our business – which is content creation. If you can write 1-2 news articles a week, you’ll be doing us a big favor. We do plan on paying our writers later when we have enough advertising revenue, so think of it as an audition for a future gig job.
- Join Our Journalists Corner – on Facebook, we have a Journalists Corner group that is tied in with our Facebook page. It’s a private group for writers and journalists interested in helping Barrington Town News succeed. Join here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/BarringtonTownNews.JournalistCorner/
- Become an Advertiser – if you provide us with enough financial resources, we can hire full-time staff so that we can report more news to the public. We lack the money to be able to have a full-time staff, and the community really deserves better. Unfortunately, we’re not made of money, but we can build a business through smaller contributions from lots of businesses in town.
- Use Our Website More – if you’re interested in helping us to be able to get more staff and get advertisers, so we can provide more news, you can use features of our website more often, such as our Classified Advertisements, which are currently free for all categories except Real Estate and Job Postings. You can do this by listing your yard sales and other items that you’d like to sell to the community. We realize there are other options to advertise, but if you want to support us, too, you can advertise with us as well. It will likely bring in more people to your yard sale or interested buyers to purchase your goods or services. The more clicks we get on our website, the more valuable the website is to advertisers. By using our website, it’s like you’re paying us every time you click on something – so please, keep doing it, do it regularly, and do it more often.
Limited Number of Newsworthy Stories
We also have the issue that there are a limited number of newsworthy stories that we can cover. There will always be more newsworthy stories, but with the limited number of staff members that we have, we need to focus on topics that we can cover in a reasonable amount of time. We also may not even know what the newsworthy topics are if someone doesn’t tell us directly. Think of the newspaper like a giant megaphone – you tell us what you’d like to see covered, then we go to work and gather that information and write an article, and then the information that you wanted is available to you and to the entire public free of charge. Wouldn’t you want to help support a business that does this public service for you?
How Can We Help?
If you’re interested in helping us with regards to our limited number of newsworthy stories, there are several things that you could do:
- Suggest Topics – if you exclusively suggest topics for us to write about, we will learn of them before you’ve mentioned them to other people. The more of a role you can play in the success of our business, the better we can provide the news to the public.
- Become a Writer – if you help us write articles for Barrington Town News, you’ll be helping us with the most important aspect of our business – which is content creation. If you can pick up a newsworthy topic and write an article about it, you’re the type of person we really want to be in contact with, because you understand what we do. If you can volunteer 1-2 articles a week, that would help us immensely.