I'm not terribly interested critiquing Bluffton Today, aside from agreeing that it is generally attractive and well-designed. And aside from thanking MU for the shout-out, I am uninterested in explaining or defending the work of my staff or the awards they have garnered in a forum in which the vast majority of participants don't regularly read both publications and thus have no basis of comparison. (No offense intended, folks.)
I do, however, have a keen interest in correcting the notion that somehow our publication is "on the run." We indeed launched a redesign Jan. 29 — a redesign that had nothing whatsoever to do with Bluffton Today. That edition was the first to roll off our new, state-of-the-art press, part of an expansion that gave us an on-site printing plant for the first time in the paper's history. (This new facility has been part of the newspaper's long-range capital improvement plans for about 12 years — 10 years before the Savannah Morning News mothballed the Carolina Morning News edition and replaced it with Bluffton Today.) The new press dramatically improved our color and sectioning capabilities and also was fitted for a 48-inch web, all of which made a redesign logical if not imperative.
Circulation and advertising are not my bailiwick, however, it is my understanding we have penetration figures that are the envy of the industry (insert joke here); a long, long history of circulation growth (in fact, in recent years, our circulation has grown even faster than the population we serve, which is one of the fastest-growing in the Southeast); and paid advertising volume that easily is about four times Bluffton Today's. While we would be foolish to ignore any challenge to our franchise, and while we certainly keep tabs on Bluffton Today, that publications has failed to cut into our advertising base or our circulation.
I also invite EGM67 to e-mail a resume to me at
[email protected]. We have no openings on my staff at this time, but I'm more than happy to keep materials on file should we have one in the near future. In fact, my most recent hire (knock on wood, that was about 20 months ago) came from a stack of old resumes.