Good afternoon,
The LinkedIn messages started coming in last week offering congratulations on our third anniversary.
It seemed a little strange at the time, but LinkedIn and Facebook algorithms churn out reminders of dates when a profile is updated.
The third anniversary of the rebranding to Delaware Business Now and the rollout of a five-day-a-week newsletter actually took place earlier in the fall. I did not get around to updating my profile until later in the fall.
The first phase of the process (I’ll skip the overused term journey) took place a couple of years earlier when it became clear that readers preferred the weekly newsletter links to content to the attached PDF business journal-style document.
Later, at a Local Independent Online Publisher’s (LION) conference in Chicago, Joe Hyde, the owner of San Angelo Live newsletter, outlined his strategy that is taking on and winning out over a chain daily newspaper with a tiny staff.
The proverbial light bulb went off and work got underway on making a five-day-a-week newsletter the core product.
The newsletter got another boost when website designer David Walsh noted that content could be “scraped” from the website and posted to the newsletter from the popular Mailchimp service.
The gains in efficiency led to a sharp reduction in broken links and allowed for more stories to be posted daily. Our archive, which largely dates from 2012, is nearing the 13,000 story mark.
Should Delaware Business Now celebrate a third anniversary or a fifth anniversary? The answer may be neither.
Our mission is to “get the news out” to an increasingly busy and vibrant business community.
At some point over the holiday break, we’ll take a moment to look back. But a half a dozen posts are sitting on the desktop and waiting for final editing.
Enjoy your Tuesday. This humble newsletter returns tomorrow. – Doug Rainey, publisher.
