Well, to begin with, there's no paper next week. Don't start with all your whining and crying. We have lives too, and need a couple of weeks off a year. Traditionally, we've taken a week in December or January and again in July or August. Anyway, like I told you, it's gonna be next week.
As far as Rebecca, Staba, Bruce and I are concerned, and I'm sure this applies to Hanchette, Gallagher, Croisdale and Bradberry as well, we enjoy writing about our corrupt president, our corrupt mayor, the homicidal maniacs who roam our streets and the crooked businessmen who actually run the town, all of whom make our jobs very easy.
But still, a person needs a couple of weeks off a year, if only to get back in touch with family and friends, do some fishing, make sure the will is filled out in such a fashion that the ex-wife gets zilch and to get rid of this goddamn headache.
So we'll meet again on the 19th of August. Until then, stay out of the way of stray gunfire, don't believe anything you hear in the way of development and, unless they're passing out free beer, keep away from politicians.
That thing about the gunfire I was really serious about. If we lose many more readers, our advertising rates are going straight into the toilet.
Since I'm already talking about the Reporter, I might as well mention here that, this week, our Web site logged visitor Number 200,000.
Most of our visitors come from right here in town. Maybe they're too lazy to go out and score a copy of the paper at one of our more than 500 outlets, or maybe they just like reading it on the Web.
Our online edition comes out a day earlier than the print version, and it's become apparent that the writers at the Niagara Gazette log on every Monday to see what we've scooped them on that particular week.
Still, we get hits and e-mails from every state in the Union. Most of these are from people who used to live in Niagara Falls but who have had to leave because of the economy here. They come back, in person, to visit and don't like what they see.
Another category of our Web visitors are those not only from the other 49 states, but from every continent on the planet save Antarctica.
They may be planning vacations, checking out world-renowned wonders or simply looking for a good read.
It turns out that articles by Gallagher and Hanchette are often linked to news Web sites, while Staba's stuff gets hooked up on professional football or boxing Web sites, and we get a lot of traffic from those.
I'll take it all.
Over the course of a year, we put around a million copies of the paper on the street here, and the readership we generate from the Web site is all just gravy.
It's good for us, good for our Web-savvy advertisers and, I think, good for the Niagara Frontier.
Politics? I'll give you politics. I've been trying to stay home, because every player, those who think they're players and the ones who are players but pretend they're not so you'll think of them as friends have been trying to bend my ear for the past month.
As the election season heats up, they hold "events" to which I am invited and to which I wouldn't go on pain of torture.
This year, the Republicans are playing smarter than the Democrats. While they have the cross of Irene Elia to bear, they're working the phones and working the streets for mayoral candidate Sam Granieri and their slate of both Democrat and Republican hopefuls for the county Legislature.
Meanwhile, the Democrats seem to be taking the tack of "Everybody's going to vote for us because we're Democrats."
They seem to be having trouble raising money, and what was once a very proactive organization under Nick Forster and Leo Alcuri seems to have devolved into a passive fraternity under the regime of Frank Soda and Tony Mondi.
I'm a registered Democrat and have been all my life. With a few exceptions -- Congressman Tom Ridge in Pennsylvania, Mayor Rudy Giuliani in New York City and state Supreme Court Justice Amy Fricano here, for example -- I've voted that way.
For the life of me, I don't understand what my party is doing. But like I told you at the top, I've got a week to think about it.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | August 5 2003 |