Kudos Laurel Leader

Laurel Leader's Editor, Melanie Dzwonchyk, has continued her unflagging support of digital publishing to keep us informed during the storm.  Melanie has heroically filed online stories during the teeth of the storm proving that local journalism doesn’t need ink and paper to serve our community. 

The Leader has published early and online this week.  You can read the Leader’s latest snow story here.  Kudos to Melanie and her team at the Leader.

It's too bad the Leader’s publishers refuse to create a professional website for our much beloved Laurel Leader.  We are left with their absolutely horrible “explore howard dot com” website.  

The fact that the “explore howard dot com” loses the brand identity provided by the Laurel Leader is sad enough.  However, the technology that their site runs on must have been first deployed by Gutenberg himself.   There seems to be simply no commitment to digital publishing by this publisher. It appears to be only an afterthought and is certainly not being worked as an emerging profit center.

I understand that community newspapers are losing money.  But it's a damn shame that the people running Patuxent Publishing do not embrace the web and dedicate their time and energies to improving their digital editions.  If there is any way to stop hemorrhaging money, the tourniquet must be built from their digital product.

Community news is vitally important to every small town in America.  I have dozens of sources for national news.  There are thousands of reporters in DC covering the federal government.  But on a good day, we only have a precious few reporters like Gwendolyn Glenn and Melanie Dzwonchyk to tell us what is happening in our own back yard.  

Come on Patuxent Publishing please give us a real community news website for the Laurel Leader.  A website that lives at laurelleader.com and a website that carries a local brand and logo that we can identify with. 

 

Slot Machine Madness

I think I'm going crazy. Listen to my hallucinations and then tell me I'm not as nutty as a West Laurelite at a pro development breakfast ...

Hallucination 1 - Maryland has enjoyed a decade of unprecedented growth. Property values and income levels are skyrocketing. So I think we should be in fat city. But I must be as mad as a dingo dog because they tell me we have a $2 billion dollar "structural" deficit.

Hallucination 2 - The Maryland General Assembly has a regular gig. They meet at the same time every year. They hang out in Annapolis from January to April and do the people's business. They write laws, go to dinners, find facts and other very intense things. Annapolis has been this way since lobbyists wore expensive powdered wigs.

But I must be nuts because I heard that the governor called for a special session next week. He must be crazier than me if he thinks Barbara Frush and Jim Rosapepe will roll over any easier on Halloween than on Valentine's Day.

Hallucination 3 - This is my big kahuna bad trip. Please follow me closely, because this is the raving of a lunatic.

• Gambling is bad.
• It's said to be addictive and hard on the poor.
• But the state allows lotteries, keno, horse racing, and scratch offs because the state is addicted to money.
• Slots are just another type of gambling.
• But slots are banned in Maryland.
• The governor says the state is now poor so he's in favor of slots.
• The state is therefore poor and addicted to gambling.
• People are fighting like hell to stop slots because slots are gambling and must be banned.
• Nobody is fighting to get rid of the other forms of gambling.
• Except barge fulls of lobbyists are grabbing fistfulls of money to lobby both sides.
• Lobbyists are addicted to money.
• Therefore lobbyists must be the same as gambling.
• Maybe we should ban lobbyists?

Please help me.

Please take the Laurel Connections Poll on slots on the left side of this screen. I also encourage you to leave your questions, rants and raves in the comment section.