Save Newport Real News in Newport Beach
When I first started SaveNewport I did it with the full expectation that it would fail. I was so mad and so angry at some of the things that our local government was doing that I felt I needed to do something– but I knew that there was no way one person could make a difference. So I decided to start this thing and give it my all. After a few months of trying, I expected that nobody would care and I would shut it down, throw my hands up and say “Well, I tried.”
Boy, things could not have gone more successfully sideways for me.
Just a few years later, we broke 4,500 subscribers on Facebook alone. In a city of 85,000 people, that’s more than 1 in 20 people who are subscribed… on Facebook! In a city of 55,000 voters, that is over 8% of the voters who are actively subscribed to our news just through Facebook. I never expected this!
Needless to say, we have a huge base who simply read the website, follow us on Twitter, or get news from us in a way other than Facebook. While it’s not news, I am highly impressed when I just checked our Waze group to find out that we have over 500 members over there, too! As we reported months ago, we were but the second group in the USA to partner with Google’s Waze– only ABC7 came before us– impressive!
Twitter has a very small– but growing– following, and we haven’t even begun the much-requested email delivery service (sorry guys, I only do this on the side– it’s coming, I promise!)
We receive weekly reads in the neighborhood of about 70,000 per week. In a city of 85,000 people– that is huge.
I could not be more pleased, more excited, or more humbled by the support I have gotten since the very beginning. It is always awesome when I pay for something with my card or put up a reservation somewhere and someone says “wait, are you the ‘SaveNewport’ Mike?”. It’s not that I enjoy the notoriety (although let’s be honest, that’s pretty darn cool), but it’s the fact that our site is read by such a massive swath of the population, and those encounters remind me of just how awesome that is.
We’ve got some huge stories coming (the city covering up some of the worst possible crimes against our youngest residents). We’ve also got some activist things that we will need your support on (Dixon has proposed getting rid of Newport’s Dog Beach), but as always, we will keep you in the loop for all of the great local events that make our community great not because of, but in spite of, the government. Thank you to all of our small businesses who make our community great. They are the ones on the front lines who struggle in the never-ending fight against unending government regulations and terribly managed construction projects that linger outside their businesses for months.
I honestly cannot appreciate everyone enough. I was never expecting this to grow the way it has. Without your support, I’d just be another fed-up citizen thinking that one person doesn’t matter. With your support, though, we have a collective voice, and people really do pay attention.
Cool secret preview: I am currently building a system which will catalog all the votes that each councilperson makes. It will tally up how much money they vote to spend, the taxes and fees that they vote to increase, and summarize in which ways they have voted to expand the government into our lives. In their coming election cycles, expect these statistics to play a very big role. They will be held accountable. 🙂
Now, if I could only build a reliable spellchecker…
