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Last year has been a rollercoaster ride
Six months ago Carrie and I embarked on a new life adventure – East Kootenay News Online Weekly.
It took about 18 months of prior planning before we launched the online-only community newspaper that covers the geographical area of the East Kootenay proper. The first 12 months of that planning wasn’t purposeful. Our other business, Through My Eyes Photography, was the sole focus (sorry) during that time, in which we gathered several hundred thousand images of the Kootenays (East and Central), as well as the Pacific Northwest, the Great Plains and for a special twist, the Philippines.
Around this time one year ago, we started to formulate the idea of e-KNOW. I have always believed in the establishment of a regional newspaper, but the cost of launching a ‘paper’ newspaper was too much to consider. Besides, that form of delivery of the news is rapidly losing its hold on an always changing human landscape.
Kicking the tires of ideas, I remembered by friend and long-time editor colleague Dave Rooney in Revelstoke, who owns and operates the Revelstoke Current, an online only newspaper, and e-KNOW was conceived. Six months of planning included valuable training from Community Futures East Kootenay , with invaluable financial support as well over the first few months of our operations. CFEK’s Self Employment Program (SEP) provided me with excellent need-to-know information and armed me with plenty to expect, anticipate and plan for when it comes to running one’s own business.
My entry into the SEP began a few weeks earlier with a major Earth event.
On the morning of Friday, March 11, we awoke early to head to the Canadian Rockies International Airport for a flight to Vancouver, where we were to board a flight to Seoul, Korea and then on to Manila, Philippines.
We’re both addicted travelers and explorers, who dive eye-first into any photographic adventure we can make happen, and neither of us had ever been to Asia. I was like a child on Christmas morning when I awoke that morning. Then we turned the telly on.
We were met with soul-stirring images and the hardcore news that Japan had been hit by a massive earthquake, now known as the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake or the Great East Japan Earthquake. The 9.0 Richter Scale quake, about 70 km off the Tohoku coast, created tsunami waves that reached a maximum height of about 40.5 metres (133 ft). Images of nature’s fury powering ashore at Miyako and Sendai, and elsewhere, seemed Hollywoodesque. The sea reached 10 km (six miles) inland and killed almost 20,000 people, as well destroyed more than 125,000 buildings.
The quake ranks in the top five most powerful ever recorded (since 1900).
With that jarring backdrop, we learned that Pacific Ocean nations were bracing for potential tsunamis, including B.C.’s coastline. The thought of flying into sea-level Richmond with a possible tsunami rolling in, was a touch dramatic to say the least.
As we know, nothing happened. In fact, impacts are only just now happening, as haunting debris from Japan has started to float ashore along the B.C. coastline.
The flight across the Pacific took us north toward the Aleutian Islands and then down to central Japan. As near as I could tell, we flew just north of Fukushima, where the tsunami caused massive damage to three reactors at the Fukushima nuclear power plant. The journalist and wide-eyed boy in me strained to see a sign of anything below, but cloud cover was too great. Yet the mere thought we were flying 35,000 feet above the site of such unbelievable carnage, in the end being the most expensive disaster in human history, was greatly humbling and stirring.
The Philippines, southwest of Japan, braced for the Tsunami but water levels increased by mere inches and the poor Ring of Fire nation was spared.
Headlines in Manila’s daily papers the next morning served as a life-moment-creating visual. Editorials in the papers over the next week also struck me. They noted that Japan is the most ‘earthquake-prepared’ nation in the world, and one of the wealthiest. They pointed at the carnage and the startling levels of unpreparedness, and made serious, dire warnings about how totally screwed the 94 million mostly poor Philippine residents would be if a similar quake and tsunami scenario happened there. The likelihood is extreme, as the 7,100 islands that make up the Philippines is on the edge of the famous Pacific Ring of Fire, just like Japan.
Reading about Manila being a potential ground zero wasteland in the aftermath of such a disaster, in a lavish hotel room on the 34th floor of a 40-plus storey high rise, was also a touch disturbing.
We traveled to the Philippines because Carrie had a contract to provide knowledge and idea assistance for the Association of Canadian Community Colleges on a new project designed to create a better education and economic system (by merging the two entities more often) in the country, which cites offshore worker wages being sent home as being the largest chunk of the nation’s gross domestic product.
I was lucky enough to be able to tag along (ha ha – one of the official languages of the Philippines is Tagalog) with my camera in hand. However, I could only travel halfway around the world for eight days. I had to be back in time to begin the CFEK program.
And it is with that immediate backdrop that this newspaper began to form.
As we enter 2012, six months old, we are proud and pleased to report that we are capturing many peoples’ attention. We’re getting so much traffic that we must upgrade our website in order to best handle it. In short, we’re getting the readership that we estimated we’d have by the end of year two.
At this time we are getting about 30,000 page views a month and about 7,500 a week. People in this region, and beyond, are enjoying e-KNOW and they’re talking about. Thanks to information from Google Analytics, about half of each week’s visitors are ‘new,’ which shows that we are still finding new readers.
Thanks to Carrie’s smarts in marketing, we’re thriving on Facebook, with 312 Likes thus far. We have 444 followers on Twitter and more than 2,500 people are receiving our weekly digital newsletters, which highlight the top stories/posts of the past week. Those may not seem like large numbers, but they’re also on par with our ‘paper only’ brothers and sisters.
Helping make e-KNOW a diverse and interesting product are our regular contributors, such as Invermere’s Bob Ede, Cranbrook’s Tanya Laing-Gahr and Gerry Warner, Kimberley’s Anne Davis and Shawn Parker, and Fernie’s newly elected mayor, Mary Giuliano. Writers/photographers Erika Baltrus, Lindsay McPherson, Stephanie Stevens and Bram Rossman have also lent their talents to the product.
One of our chief goals is to establish a true regional ‘writers’ village,’ with room for them to move creatively, without the scourge of censorship. If you are a writer or photographer with an eye on this region, we heartily invite you to submit your work to us for consideration of publication.
The region’s arts and entertainment movers and shakers are seizing upon e-KNOW, the sole on-line only paper in the East Kootenay, as a way to get their word out, as are many not-for-profit organizations and municipal agencies.
Our numbers are already on par with all established regional newspapers – after just six months – and we are truly grateful and thankful for our readers and contributors.
The hunger for a new and different news delivery product is obvious and the appreciation of e-KNOW being independent and free of the meddlesome and homogenized overbearing of a board of directors located on the other side of the province is also apparent.
Heading into 2012 we will endeavour to continue to create a colourful daily and weekly snapshot of life as it is happening in the East Kootenay.
In order to make it the best product we can provide, we invite all community organizations to continue to send us press releases about upcoming events or stand-out moments, as well as photographs. Please send your releases to: [email protected] or [email protected]. Feel free to also call us at 250-421-1660.
The upcoming year will also see an increase in work on display in our travel and tourism section. We will keep showcasing the region’s abundant natural and human-crafted beauty, and also branch out beyond our region to highlight the cool stuff about our neighbouring jurisdictions, as well as elsewhere in the world.
We always welcome feedback and letters to the editor – either as submissions or tagged at the bottom of our stories as ‘comments.’
Once again, thanks to our readers and contributors and advertisers. To each of you – may 2012 be filled with success and happiness.
Ian Cobb/e-KNOW
