Editorial: Welcome to the St. Augustine Underground
We’ve heard from a lot of you in the months since we announced The Saint Augustine Underground. What we’ve heard has been overwhelmingly supportive.
The Underground is an alternative newspaper. And when I tell people that I think it’s important to explain what it means.
I believe there are two core types of alternative newspapers: shock sheets, and those that are built around investigative journalism. The Underground is the latter.
Investigative journalists are an endangered species. All across the country, daily papers have opted to channel their resources to the kind of meat and potatoes coverage that includes reporting on school board and city commission meetings, and on breaking news — the kind of quick, often-incorrect reports that drive the online news cycle — instead of channeling resources into telling their readers the stories that no one else is reporting.
Investigative news requires a lot of shoe-leather reporting, and doesn’t happen overnight. If a paper is going to be good at it, it has to be willing to allow its reporters the time necessary to get to the heart of the story.
When I tell you that The Underground is an alternative newspaper, it’s important to know what it is an alternative to.
First, we’re going to surrender breaking news to the bloggers and the daily newspaper (which still seems to think that “scooping” the competition is important, even in an age where some teenager with a cell phone probably scooped the paper hours before it went to press).
We’re also not going to run wire-service stories about what’s going on in Washington and elsewhere. If you wanted to know what happened in Washington yesterday, you read about it on the Internet last night. I know I did.
Instead we’re going to look beyond the obvious and try to find the back story, the truth behind the headlines. If a story from Washington touches you here, we’re going to try to find out how and tell you that story.
The Saint Augustine Underground’s genesis was just a couple of months ago. It began as a pipe dream that News Editor Sara Kaufman and I shared while I lounged in her office with my feet literally on her desk.
At the time, Kaufman had recently filed a report for the Ponte Vedra Recorder about a complex land deal, involving several developers who had business in front of the St. Johns County Commission, that had resulted in former Commission Chairman Jim Bryant being able to live on marshfront property that his wife had received essentially for free. At the time, Bryant’s house on the property was for sale for a cool $1 million.
The story is complex, and took several weeks of investigation to sort out.
A few days after the story appeared, The St. Augustine Record profiled Bryant and mentioned Kaufman’s report.
“… he was asked questions relating to his wife Cynthia and her land dealings before they married. According to the Ponte Vedra Beach newspaper, these have been investigated and no wrongdoing was found,” was what The Record had to say about the issue.
I encourage you to read Kaufman’s report and see if you agree with The Record’s assessment.
The Underground is not the first alternative news source St. Augustine readers have seen.
Many honorable efforts have come and gone, including a scrappy little newspaper called The Watertown News that published several issues earlier this year before editor and publisher Lee Malis decided to raise anchor and sail toward bluer waters.
I can’t guarantee the success of The Saint Augustine Underground. That depends on you, the readers, and on the support of St. Augustine’s business community. But we do have a few resources that will help us to succeed where others have faltered.
Many of you are probably familiar with Morris Publishing Group, the company that owns both the St. Augustine Record and Florida Times-Union.
Your probably not as familiar with our company. The Underground is published by Journal Communications Inc. which is headquartered in Milwaukee, Wis. and was founded in 1882. We are a diversified media company with operations in publishing, radio and television broadcasting, interactive media and printing services.
We publish the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the only major daily newspaper for the Milwaukee metropolitan area, which has had taken home two Pulitzer prizes in the last three years.
Journal Community Publishing Group publishes a number of community newspapers in Wisconsin and Florida, including The Underground, The Ponte Vedra Recorder, the First Coast Register, Clay Today and The Florida Mariner.
Through Journal Broadcast Group, we own and operate 33 radio stations and 13 television stations in 12 states and operate an additional television station under a local marketing agreement.
That means a lot of eyes are on us right now.
But the most important eyes on The Underground are yours. We hope you like what you see. If you have suggestions for making The Saint Augustine Underground better, let me know. Thanks for reading.
Mark Pettus, Editor
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