Replies

Shibumi, thank you for the links to the comments by the ownership of Free Republic; I’m copying this post to Jim Robinson. I care about private property and will not do anything contrary to the requests of the owners of Free Republic, so rather than guessing what he thinks I’m sending him a copy.

Since he’s probably never heard of me before, I’ve been a registered member of Free Republic since 2006 and have been reading FR longer than that.

I’m a conservative. I’ve spent two and a half decades in the news media, and am very much aware of the problems of liberal bias. I also own the primary civilian news operation outside Fort Leonard Wood, the home of the Army’s Engineer, Chemical, and Military Police schools, and both I and my business partners care a great deal about the military and getting its story told.

In the nearly three years I’ve been crossposting military-related articles to Free Republic, I’ve never seen the sort of comments I’ve seen today. I’m trying to listen to the arguments as if they were made as a polite request, but the accusations I’ve gotten today of “pimping” most emphatically do not go down well with me. If you want to know my motive in posting these Joplin tornado articles, it’s simple — getting attention for what the Missouri National Guard and local communities are doing to help Joplin. Ascribing any other motive is simply not true, and I hope what I am writing is an appropriately calm response to a false accuation of bad motives.

To repeat what I’ve said earlier in this thread, Pulaski County Daily News advertisers are local, not national. We do not benefit from large amounts of web traffic outside the area, and our statistics do not show that Free Republic is a major source of web traffic. If it became a major source of web traffic, both I and my business partners would have a problem, because we need to tell our advertisers that when they buy an ad it will mostly be seen by local readers or those who have some sort of connection with Fort Leonard Wood.