Henderson County Now Nears New Milestone

By Michael V. Hannigan

Henderson County Now will likely break the 11,000 fan/likes mark on Facebook sometime this weekend. I always knew HCN would be successful, but I really did not expect this type of growth this fast.

I can’t thank our readers enough for their involvement and loyalty. It is humbling when I stop to think about it.

I remember when Jeff Weinstein and I sat down and talked about the project in the beginning and we said we hoped to get 3,000 or 4,000 fans in the first 12 months. We quickly learned to change our goals.

Around the 2013 Livestock Show we broke the 1,000 “Talking About” mark. That’s the number of folks actively interacting with the page on a daily basis. I warned Jeff to not be surprised when that number dropped back down, because at that time nobody in the county was plus-1,000 Talking About.

But I don’t think we ever dipped back into the hundreds and we consistently run between 1,500 and 1,800 these days, with spikes to 3,000 and 4,000 at times.

Not that everyone likes what we are doing. I had a fairly prominent Athens attorney tell me this week that nobody reads my work.

Then there are the longtime journalists, my peers, who often don’t understand what I am doing. I guess that’s not a surprise considering I consciously chucked the rulebook in a profession where knowing the rules forward and backward is a badge of honor. We used to argue in the newsroom about which state’s had to be abbreviated, but now I don’t worry about such things.

And “deconstructing the story” was practically sacrilege. That’s the university way of saying I stopped writing newspaper style and tried to start talking to my readers. I shoved the inverted pyramid into a locked drawer.

And that evolution continues today as I work to find the best way to get readers the information they need and want.

The truth is some of my attempts have been abject failures. Some have succeeded. The experiment moves forward.

It has to move forward. Technology and the changing tide of social media demands it to keep up with the way readers communicate. The cool thing is that in Jeff I have a partner who gives me the opportunity to try new things and is committed to serving the community.

We can’t wait to see what’s next.