pinion The Bradenton Times Leaps Into The New Year

As Publisher of The Bradenton Times, it has been exciting to watch a new model of local news evolve. I would like to thank both our readership and those who provide content. While it is our goal to be the best we can, even with limited resources, we could not be a quality product without those who provide us content.

The growth of readership has leaped from our previous high of 120,000 unique visits, to now starting the year averaging 170,000 for January and February. This is more than double from last year. If you are an advertiser with us, this obviously translates to greater value, as your brand is seen more often, by more readers. If you are not, what are you waiting for? Prices start at just ten dollars.

Our editor, Dennis Maley is in charge of our reporters and guides our product with not only his very informative articles, but manages content and provides responses to emails and phone calls. I encourage any of our readers to reach out to Dennis and share with him ideas you may have for our coverage, or provide comments on his or any of our articles. We love hearing what you like to see in The Bradenton Times or hearing ideas on things we can include in the future. It is important to hear you thoughts!

I know from comments we receive that people do have different opinions regarding our content. As the publisher, I do not always agree with our opinion pieces. However, this publication wasn't founded to reflect just my opinion. The goal from the beginning has been to provide an informative and educational product for the community, based on facts. Sometimes facts support both sides of a position depending on a person's perspective. But if we only get news from sources that tell us what we want to hear, it does not serve the best interest of our society. Having a platform for informed debate of competing perspectives is important to any democracy and was something our founding fathers held very dear; the Freedom of the Press.

That is why you will see opposing views published and even comments criticizing the writer. It should go without saying that civil debate is what makes our society work best. We do our best to not publish anything that is a personal attack. Anything we publish, from comments to letters, we know who they are and the name of the author is attached. This is a different approach aimed to avoid the kind of content that regularly appears in the blogs you find in the Bradenton Herald, which often contain hateful comments and uncivil dialog by those who hide behind a screen handle. We continue to hear from readers that the absence of such vitriol is an admired quality of the product we publish.

In closing, I am humbled by our success. I want this publication to be part of the ”soul of our community“ and the explosive growth in readership we are seeing is encouragement that a large contingent of this area sees us as that already. Let's continue to work together to make this community a better place, while ensuring that residents have a powerful resource to stay informed about critical issues we face.