Can it be Five Years Already?

This week marks my 5th anniversary with The Bradenton Times. The last five years have been among the most exciting and rewarding in my professional career, and I'd like to take the opportunity to reflect on that experience in this week’s column.

When I first came to TBT, it was a start-up company, still defining itself while struggling to make a mark in one of the most challenging industries in the American economy. Newspapers on the whole were not doing very well, a dynamic greatly compounded by the near collapse of our economy, which had pretty much coincided with the launch.

Our publisher, Joe McClash, who was still a Manatee County Commissioner at that time, had started the paper in an effort to broaden the conversation in a county that had become dominated by a single publication. Joe was still feeling his way around a business that was new to him beyond his many hours spent on the other side of a reporter's tape recorder. His instructions were simple: ”Tell the truth, and spell everyone's name right.“

Joe told me that he had originally envisioned a weekly print product, similar in layout to The Islander or the AMI Sun. However, the steep cost of delivering a printed product on a countywide scale, along with the decline of print publishing and the rise of digital products, led him to reconsider. There was no initial marketing. The site went live and they emailed a weekly newsletter to a list that contained little more than Joe's personal contacts. Not long after, TBT scored its first big story with a multipart investigative series on the Palmetto Public Works/CRA scandal.

Things had been underway for nearly a year when I came on board. There were two reporters on the news side and a website manager. That was it. As the paper’s ”news editor,“ I covered just about every government you could think of: county commission, county planning commission, school board, Bradenton City Council, Palmetto City Council, Tourist Development Council, Metropolitan Planning Organization, etc. Plus, I edited the other reporter, who covered all of our non-government content.

The days were long, the pay was about two-thirds that of a first-year teacher, and there was rarely a single day off, let alone a summer break. My friends thought I was crazy, but the chance to have that much creative control and help shape what I truly believed had the potential to be a major news source for Manatee County was something I found very appealing. Suffice it to say, I had big plans.

My first assignment was the BP oil spill, which occurred my very first day on the job. There was a lot of concern that black tar balls would be rolling up on our shores. Shortly after, I covered the county's controversial bid process for concessions at its Holmes Beach pavilion. We presented a side of the story that was not being told, and when all was said and done, we alone had gotten it right. We didn't reverse the injustice that had occurred, but we managed to tell the story. People noticed. It was the first article that received over 1,000 reads on the still word-of-mouth driven site and gave me an opportunity to do my first opinion column for the paper.

A couple a months later, I did an expose on the Manatee County Jail that drew many times more clicks. People continued to notice. I was given a Sunday column, and it wasn't long before I had my first story that drew over 20,000 views – a somewhat modest number that was nonetheless unthinkable only a short time prior.

Subscriptions to our Weekly Recap grew and soon we added the Sunday Edition, which included a new column by one of our USF interns. She wasn't sure about the title, but I convinced Merab Favorite that Sunday Favorites was a winner. It became one of the top Florida History columns in the state, and she went on to do two editions of the Arcadia Press' Images of America series – Palmetto and Bradenton.

In 2011, all of the other local publications were echoing the Manatee School District's self-ascribed successes, while ignoring red flags that were being pointed out by two recently-elected school board members, along with a sizable group of local citizen watchdogs. Indeed, on the very day that former Superintendent Tim McGonegal would announce that he'd been misleading both the board and the public into thinking that the district held a $5 million surplus, when it had in fact been covering up a multimillion dollar deficit, the Bradenton Herald's Op/Ed page was singing McGonegal's praises and all but blaming Julie Aranibar and Karen Carpenter for the rumored ”health problems“ that had inspired an early retirement.

That was the issue more than any other that seemed to signal a shift in the way that those in Manatee County who followed their local governments viewed our publication. We had once again given a side of the story that had been otherwise missing, and at the end of the day, we were the ones who had gotten it right.

This would happen again when the City of Bradenton would try to rush through a highly dubious plan to help subsidize the former ”Pink Palace“ downtown, only to table the deal and ultimately do it for a fraction of the public money that had originally been billed as both a necessity and a good investment.

We gave you the other side of the story when the county tried to deceptively push through a half-cent sales tax under the false guise of a property-tax reduction, and when they were less than honest in the cost of needlessly renegotiating the county administrator's contract, long before it expired.

Of course there was also Long Bar Pointe, the fight to save Beer Can Island and many other issues in which TBT managed to bring you a side of the story that wasn't being presented elsewhere. We've also heard from many readers who feel that our presence has at times forced the bigger publications to tackle a story they might have otherwise ignored, or present a more balanced perspective on controversial ones.

Having a lean staff and constant need for content also allowed me to return to other areas of journalism that I had enjoyed like travel writing, food & wine, and local theater. It has also given me the opportunity to engage my community in a way that I would have never previously imagined and to interact with a remarkably diverse group of Manatee County residents, many of whom have become close friends.

Today, I am very proud of the publication we have built. I am grateful for a publisher whose love for Manatee County has inspired him to invest in an invaluable resource for like-minded citizens seeking to preserve its many unique charms. I am grateful for a staff of dedicated journalists, each of whom go above and beyond every week for no other reason than they believe in what we are doing. Most of all, I am grateful for you, the reader, and the opportunity you give me each week to tell my stories and share my thoughts. I look forward to many more years of fighting the good fight together.

Dennis Maley's column appears every Thursday and Sunday in The Bradenton Times. He can be reached at dennis.maley@thebradentontimes.com. Click here to visit his column archive. Click here to go to his bio page. You can also follow Dennis on Facebook.