Jason Sandford
Jason Sandford is a reporter, writer, blogger and photographer interested in all things Asheville.
Here’s the announcement, written by Giles Morris of the Tuckasegee Reader. The site is a reconstituted version of the Southern Highland Reader, which established itself in a short period of time as a great source for news from Jackson County and thereabouts. These guys are really trying to make a hyper-local news website a profitable, ongoing concern. Check them out. You’ll be hearing more about them.
Hello and welcome to the Tuckasegee Reader. If you’re reading this, you’re already curious about who and what we are. We’re glad. We need you.
Bill Graham, Laurie Powell and I wouldn’t have started this venture if we didn’t think we could create something new that the area needs. Our purpose is to be the first true online media company in the heart of Western North Carolina’s mountains. We want to use Tuckreader.com as as a place that our community can tell its own story.
Our community –– which stretches from Cashiers to the Nantahala Gorge –– is not about meetings, robberies, traffic accidents, or even local politics. It’s about the mountains and the people who live in them, and our editorial approach will reflect that.
The Internet is a place where information is free, moves on a 24-hour cycle, and needs to be specific to have value.
While every newspaper in America has a Web site these days, many of them still use them to reproduce the work they’ve always done in print. Their editorial and advertising departments focus on the print product, while their Web site, which doesn’t make money, languishes.
We’re using the Web as our primary platform because we think it’s the best way to deliver information, because it’s the best way for local advertisers to reach their markets, and because we think we’ve reached a point where the media market can support it.
You’ve probably heard the catch-phrases about local Web sites. Hyperlocal news. Community journalism. Bloggers. The reality is that the Web allows more people to have a voice at a time when everyone is required to tell their own story. Everyone from businesses to schools to government agencies produces their own content now. The world is full of information. The trick now is how to organize it.
My great-grandfather was a newspaper man. He covered the Scopes trial and served as editor of the Memphis Commercial Appeal.
Is he turning in his grave? I don’t think so.
Our culture is changing. News used to be how we separated fact from fiction. Now news is just a little piece of a larger concept: Information. In the information age, we still need reporters. We still need writers. We still need the truth. But we also need a trusted local editorial lens to help us sift through the mountain of information available to us from moment to moment. We need, in some cases, to be reminded why it’s important to care about one thing instead of another.
Tuckasegee Reader is committed to providing the area from Cashiers to the Nantahala Gorge with a platform for sharing and organizing timely and relevant information.
