A year or two ago, some guy in town started up a web site to compete with our paper. Dude mostly hustles after scanner calls, which I'll give him credit for. Day or night, he seems to find time to drop what he's doing and chase down every wreck or crime in town, usually accompanied by a Facebook Live video and a story relatively light on details. He's largely a one-man operation on that stuff, and I don't know how he finds the energy to do it.
Several things about his operation annoy the ship out of me, though.
He likes to mention we're not locally owned (we were bought by a chain in 2013 after more than a century of local family ownership) as if everyone working at the paper is operating in another state. Our shortest-tenured person in the newsroom has been there two or three years, which might be the longest we've gone without any turnover in my 20-plus years here.
We also had a kerfluffle a while back with a fatal wreck where we had a picture of the car -- a black SUV in a ditch that could have been any one of a hundred black SUVs in town -- posted to Facebook with our story, and people treated it as if we posted a picture of a bloody body.sS While shooting his video from up the street, Web Site Guy tried to take the high road by saying, "Unlike other news outlets, we don't show the vehicle." Not two weeks prior there was a shooting where he was early on the scene and he posted pictures of them loading the corpse into the coroner's van. A few weeks before that there was a non-fatal wreck where he was practically filming from inside the car.
He's friendly when I see him around town, but I want to kick him in the balls. His entire operation was founded on the premise that we suck and any schmoe can do what we do, and do it better. He doesn't do it better. It's an insult.
Now he's branched out by hiring a sports guy who is absolutely terrible. Bad or mediocre writing is one thing, but this guy offers no details in his stories, gets facts wrong (he posted a preview story about a game played on Thursday, and among many mistakes was including that it would be played on Friday at a different field), regularly spells names wrong, the works. All stuff that if we did it, people would rightly roast us for. But instead people pat him on the head and say, "Good job! Great story!"
Every like and "attaboy" this guy gets kills my faith in humanity.