When I came to Sault Ste. Marie to re-launch SooToday as an online news service in 2002, I thought a lot about Lorne Greene.
Best known for his roles in television’s Bonanza and Battlestar Galactica, Greene had served earlier as a pioneering CBC newsreader during World War II.
He played a major role in weaning Canadians off print journalism, helping to establish broadcast media as credible news sources.
“This SooToday job isn’t just journalism,” I said to myself. “It’s behaviour modification. I need to persuade people to get their news in a new way, online.”
It was a hard battle at first. In those days, people often said “don’t believe anything you read on the Internet.”
Competitors dismissed SooToday as an “Internet rag.”
I persisted, working 100+ hours a week to bring you the news, employing principles of operant conditioning to build a loyal audience.
With the backing of remarkably patient investors, brilliant, visionary management and a hard-working team of talented co-workers, we built a new model of hyperlocal news that has spread across Ontario and even further.
There was one thing I did differently from Lorne Greene.
He was known during the war years as “the Voice of Doom.”
I knew from experience that a well-written story about someone winning an award attracted as many readers as an investigative report, which often was 10 or 20 times more costly to produce.
We would provide first-class hard news. But we would also write about the things that make Sault Ste. Marie great.
Somehow it all came together.
We built a better mousetrap and the world is beating a path to our office at Queen and Bruce to learn how we did it.
When I came to Sault Ste. Marie to re-launch SooToday as an online news service in 2002, I thought a lot about Lorne Greene.
Best known for his roles in television’s Bonanza and Battlestar Galactica, Greene had served earlier as a pioneering CBC newsreader during World War II.
He played a major role in weaning Canadians off print journalism, helping to establish broadcast media as credible news sources.
“This SooToday job isn’t just journalism,” I said to myself. “It’s behaviour modification. I need to persuade people to get their news in a new way, online.”
It was a hard battle at first. In those days, people often said “don’t believe anything you read on the Internet.”
Competitors dismissed SooToday as an “Internet rag.”
I persisted, working 100+ hours a week to bring you the news, employing principles of operant conditioning to build a loyal audience.
With the backing of remarkably patient investors, brilliant, visionary management and a hard-working team of talented co-workers, we built a new model of hyperlocal news that has spread across Ontario and even further.
There was one thing I did differently from Lorne Greene.
He was known during the war years as “the Voice of Doom.”
I knew from experience that a well-written story about someone winning an award attracted as many readers as an investigative report, which often was 10 or 20 times more costly to produce.
We would provide first-class hard news. But we would also write about the things that make Sault Ste. Marie great.
Somehow it all came together.
We built a better mousetrap and the world is beating a path to our office at Queen and Bruce to learn how we did it.