 With
this issue, Electric Nevada --- for the moment at
least -- puts its news-gathering operation on hold. The
columnists you like to check out every week -- Vin and
Ira, especially -- will still be here for you. But it
will be as part of a new approach to web publishing that
we will soon start trying out. Regarding EN, in the last 16 months of
this experiment in weekly web journalism we've had a
great deal of fun tracking down and publishing local and
state (and even occasionally national) news stories which
otherwise would never see the light of day here in
northern Nevada. [Our voluminous archives will remain on the Web.] That's why Electric Nevada was begun:
it was largely a 'just-can't stand it' reaction to the
suffocating news-vacuum being perpetrated on Northern
Nevadans, as a matter of explicit policy, by the local
Gannett product. Today, however, that monopoly's vacuum -- at
least for state news -- is largely over. Nevadans on the
web have access every day to the far superior state news
coverage of the Las Vegas Review-Journal and,
sometimes, the Las Vegas Sun. Nationally, and
internationally, of course, the quantity on the web for
followers of the news is immense. |
The
special news niches which EN came to cover most
intensively -- largely because no one else would -- have
been the ceaseless depradations on rural Nevadans by the federales'
Western bureaucratic octopus, and other instances, in the
Silver State, of the eternal war against human freedom. Unfortunately, at present there is not yet a
high-profile web (or print) publishing operation able to
fill that gap. The capital investment necessary to
support a web news operation of even Electric Nevada's
limited size remains substantial. We were able to come up
with it for a while, but -- in company with all the major
national news organizations -- have not been able to find
an adequate financial model to make the web operation
self-supporting. You may be interested to know that some
philanthropists are contemplating a non-profit support
arrangement, so that EN's reporting can continue in the
near future. Other ideas are being discussed in other
quarters. We'll just have to see what develops.
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