Visit Scunthorpe Founder Opens New Blog
29 December 2011 by Paul Rhoades
Well its the end of another excellent year for the www.VisitScunthorpe.Com web site which has seen a massive growth in both readers and contributors over the last year.
Part of this is sadly due to the local Scunthorpe Telegraph becoming a weekly publication which personally I feel is a real blow for the town. However, I feel that the main reason for our massive growth in visitor numbers is due to the large number of quality posters who have joined the site and really started contributing in the last year. So heart felt thanks to all of these people.
Another major step forward for the site was a re-write of the Scunthorpe Engine by Jake who along with Julie and my self founded the site two years ago. Jake's re-write took my early, basic version and added enhance functionality to the news posting software and also the ability for members to contribute photographs to the galleries and upload stories with feature rich content such as video and photos so again many thanks to Jake for that.
Something else which we have started doing this year is live blogging from local events. This has mainly been council meetings using coverit live. We were also fortunate enough to be able to attend the local election count in may and blogged live through the night from an exhausting count which saw the make up of the local council change.
The biggest single contributor in our growth of visitor numbers comes however from you, the readers, and your links via facebook, twitter and email which you use to share our articles with your friends. So many thanks for this.
We established Visit Scunthorpe to provide an alternative source of news other than the main stream traditional press to enable and empower people living in North Lincolnshire to share their news, views and achievements with others. We've turned down several financially lucrative sponsorship offers over this time in order to maintain the site's independence, as we felt that it could limit poster's objectivity if they saw branding or commercial sponsorship from local businesses appearing on the site. While we'd love to be able to get a bit of revenue from the site considering the hundreds of hours it's consumed in terms of programming and maintenance, we still maintain that this site should not carry commercial sponsorship or adverts.
Visit Scunthorpe does now however seem to have reached some level of maturity, and will hopefully continue to grow and expand over the next year as it has in the last two. We are getting lots of fresh new articles published by community members most days, and hope that this continues in to the future.
As the site now has several major contributors, I've decided over the next year to focus my efforts on a slightly broader horizon. Last year we introduced sections for politics and national news to allow the site to reflect more broader, national content, but did come under some criticism initially for lacking independence in some of those articles. From my own personal perspective the site has always had independence, and a wide variety of political views have been expressed by a range of different posters. My own writing has always been leftward looking shall we say, and for this I make no apologies.
However, there are now topics and subjects which I wish to address personally, which are of a highly politicised nature, and do not necessarily directly reflect or influence the region. One could argue that the broader political conjecture of the country today does directly affect our region, but for many the links may be tenuous.
Therefore I have decided that while I will continue to post local stories on Visit Scunthorpe, my thoughts and comments on wider ranging subjects will appear on a new blog which may appeal to a wider audience. I'd like to invite any one who may be interested to join me on this new blog, where I'll be commenting on some broader social and political issues which I believe will heavily affect and influence working class communities like Scunthorpe over the next year.
Please join me at http://LincolnshireRed.Wordpress.Com where again your comments and feedback on my articles will be welcome.
If you would like add your own news article to Visit Scunthorpe, Login or sign up, its free and easy and you can start publishing your own content here, straight away.
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Please Note
Views expressed on this site are those of individual posters, who by making these posts indemnify Visit Scunthorpe and its operators of any legal responsibility or obligation.
Please respect the privacy of others, if someone gives you infomation that you use in your post, please don't identify them.
Visit Scunthorpe is North Lincolnshire's only truly independent, non commercial, community news web site.
Established in January 2010 we have lots of members with a wide range of views who all contribute
independently with articles of their own.
You won't find dozens of adverts covering our site, or some poor attempt to promote local business services under the guise of offering a community service.
Here on VisitScunthorpe we are interested in just one thing, building an online community which is representative of the people of Scunthorpe, North Lincolnshire and the surrounding area.
Paul. Founder Visit Scunthorpe.
How it Works
If you would like to have the ability to add articles and comments to Visit Scunthorpe then all you need to do is sign up with a valid email address for an account. This is free, your email address is confidential and we don't send out spam emails.
Once you've completed the sign up then you are free to post and comment on well... pretty much anything, we just have some basic civilised rules to prevent people from inciting violence, hatred or making individual attacks.
If you have a web site or directory which covers either independent news and blogging, or is related to North Lincolnshire or Scunthorpe then get in touch to set up a reciprocal link.
