Very early on Thursday morning, July 12, Gazette staff awoke to an email inbox full of messages from town clerks, road commissioners and select board members. Others were posting on Facebook and Instagram about flooding and the damage it was causing.
The messages and social media posts made it clear flood waters were still rising in many places. They were expected to continue rising well into the new day.
We at the Gazette usually take Thursday off after getting out the week’s paper Tuesday evening and taking care of administrative tasks on Wednesday.
We were planning on a relaxing day until a note came in from a town clerk, asking how the roads were in neighboring towns because they wanted to offer accurate information to their townsfolk.
That set us on the task of gathering information from many sources as we do every week; if town clerks needed information, almost certainly others did too.
This time we did it in just a few hours to share with our readers as an email alert and Facebook post with the most accurate and complete information we could find for all of our 11 towns.
Just before 7:30 a.m. we sent that information to the same 1,200 readers we send notice to when our issue is published each week. Ten percent more of them opened that email message than even opened a short notice of the Route 15 closure due to flooding near Brown Farm Road in Hardwick the night before.
One thousand seven hundred people went to our website that day, when our usual daily traffic is under 700; often well under.
Our Facebook page that sometimes gets 2,500 daily visitors when the new issue comes out, but often sees under 100 on a day we don’t share any new posts, had 9,735 unique visitors that day, and 7,810 the next.
We know what we do is valuable to people in our communities and elsewhere because of that data.
We appreciate the thanks we’ve received for offering an essential service when you in our communities need it.
We now need your help with donations so we can pay staff and pay for the things we need to keep bringing independent, fresh and accurate local news to you; not just with a fresh new issue each week, but also in between issues when it’s important.
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Paul Fixx, editor
Paul Fixx is editor of The Hardwick Gazette and lives in Hardwick.
