The Independent Blog

Posted by The Independent on January 26th, 2009 in General News

1. You can increase/decrease the font size now on story pages. Just look for the Text Size icon across the top of an article.

2. The newsroom employs 6 beat reporters, 2 full-time photographers and 3 sports reporters. We cover Ag, Cops & Courts, City Government, Health & Business, Education, and Regional along with local and state sports.

3. We have in-house bloggers and community bloggers and we’re always looking for more folks in the community to blog. We’d love to feature you!

4. We’re on Facebook! Friend us if you like (GI Indy), or we also have a fan page if you prefer that

5. Most newspapers have a morgue. The Indy keeps a set of newspapers dating back to the late 1800s in its morgue.

6. Having trouble finding your way around our new site? Try scrolling to the bottom of our front page. We have a full sitemap down there that you can use to easily find what you need.

7. We publish every day of the year except Christmas Day.

8. In addition to our morgue, we have are also archived at the Grand Island Public Library. You can call 308-385-5333 for more info about this.

9. We have an in-house cartoonist who makes everyone jealous with his mad skillz. You may have seen his stuff in the paper in the Editorial section, or Husker section under his alter ego, Louie Longshot. You can view his cartoons for the past two years at http://www.grandislandblogs.com/billdunn/

10. The Independent has a special website set up with complete coverage of the disastrous 1980 tornadoes. “Night of the Twisters” has been made into a book taught in elementary schools as well as a movie. You can find the website at http://www.gitwisters.com.

11. Grand Island had several newspapers in the 1880s. “The city’s first newspaper was the “Platte Valley Independent”, established by Seth P. and Maggie Mobley.  The Platte Valley Independent was a weekly paper, and referred to as a Republican paper.  Another paper also considered to be Republican followed soon after, entitled “Grand Island Times”, and was owned by Charles P.R. Williams.  It began as a weekly paper and later scaled down to semi weekly publishing’s. A third semi-weekly paper was developed for the German population.  It was an eight page, six column paper established by Henry Garn and Charles Boehl.” – source http://www.grand-island.com

12. In order to prepare for each day’s edition, the newsroom meets once in the morning with reporters, photographers and editors to talk about what each of them are working on. Then the editors meet in the afternoon with the copy desk to discuss what stories will be in the next day’s edition.

13. Senior columnist George Ayoub, in edition to his duties at the paper, also teaches a journalism class at Grand Island Senior High.

14. One of the most popular blogs we feature is “Scenes from the Morgue” in which Chad Plambeck in Composing and Bad Movie Buff extraordinaire pulls retro movie ads from old copies of the Independent and talks about the films. Check it out: http://scenesfromthemorgue.blogspot.com/

15. Simply Cooking hostess, Mitzi Stinson, is the wife of our head photographer, Barrett Stinson.

16. A few reporters have jumped on the Twitter wagon: Regional Reporter Mark Coddington (http://twitter.com/markcoddington), Ag reporter Robert Pore (http://twitter.com/robertpore) and Photographer Scott Kingsley (http://twitter.com/skingsley) all tweet regularly.

17. Associate Editor, Pete Letheby, produces a monthly section called Silver Salute that is full of great historical features about GI residents and places.

18. The Independent is the largest news gathering organization between Lincoln and Denver.

19. Our newsroom staff has over 200 years reporting experience combined.

20. The daily poll questions are written by either Community Conversation Editor, Bill Dunn or one of the copy desk editors.

21. The Independent used to be an evening newspaper. We switched to a morning edition on May 4th, 1992.

22. Our website, www.theindependent.com, averages anywhere between 1-2 million pageviews and over 96,000 unique visitors per month.

23. The Online Department consists of an editor, a developer and two videographers – one to cover news and sports and one for advertising.

24. Don’t have a subscription but want to pick up an edition? You can always stop in our office during business hours to pick one up, or check here for our single copy dealer locations.

25. Do reporters pack up and head home at 5pm? Nope! There is always a night reporter on duty until 9pm every night, including weekends.