Another Letter To The Editor

Joe:

I’m from the upper shore (Cecil County), but get to the greater Salisbury area several times a year. Thus I have an interest in what’s going on in local news on the Lower Shore. For some time now I’ve an Salisbury news on an RSS feed and I surf over a couple of times a day to get unfiltered local news. Thanks for putting all the effort into an alternative news source, which surely takes a lot of time. Since I’ve been reading SBY for a while now, I’ve taken note of how you go about covering things, how the discussions go on and much more, and I’ve learned a lot from just about blog management just from reading your work.

Recently I got involved in a little issue up here, where the Town of Elkton wants to sell 20 acres of public park land, which they had just acquired in 2003, to a developer. They paid for it mostly with state grant money and at the time the applications they filed talked about how priceless it was and valuable. Then in March a developer came along and wanted to build a Target Store and It suddenly wasn’t worth much as far as the public good was concerned. Got me!

When I heard about this, I tried and tried to get the local newspaper to cover it so there was some sunshine on the subject. I realize it may have been too complex to write about, but all they had to do was a basic paragraph saying that the sale was proposed or summarize my comments in public meetings. That never happened.

Then I remembered the things I’d been observing at SBY and said why not create a political blog. I knew how to blog in general since I use them for non-political matters, but making sure people knew about a municipal policy and arguing with local government was knew. I only rolled it out on Aug 10, but having observed some practical lessons from reading Maryland’s #1 political blog, I’ve put some of the observations to good use.

I’m not as far along as you are with your on-the-scene reporting and things, but I’ve included audio and may try some of the other methods. Town meetings here get almost no light of day from local media, especially the tricky, complicated things.

The Paper still hasn’t covered it, but the clicks keep on coming (by our standards) and people are talking.

Mike Dixon

GO HERE to see Mike's new Blog.