Moderater's Farewell

A recent Anonymous commenter to this bog wrote, "this blog is not the opinions of blue hill. It's the opinion of Andy, Jessie and Slyvia Alber. It's your personel get back at everybody that wrongs you!! What a joke."

Last summer, I attended a workshop at Central Community College. At this workshop, one of the presenters introduced us to http://dorchestertimes.blogspot.com/, a community blog for Dorchester, Nebraska. Dorchester does not have local newspaper and a group of citizens had put together this forum to share the news, events, opinions and people of their town.

Although Blue Hill is lucky to still have the Blue Hill Leader, I thought the idea of a community blog for Blue Hill to share our news, stories and opinions was a great idea. The Blue Hill Leader can only afford so much ink, but an online medium could share any story that community members wanted to share. News can be shared the same day it happens and readers could respond personally to each story.

So on Saturday, June 20, 2009, I launched Blue Hill Today with these words; "The intent of Blue Hill Today is to make the community itself the writers, photographers, editors and publishers of this new news source. No news is too big or too small for Blue Hill Today. There will never be any fees for submission, subscrition, or even advertising on Blue Hill Today. New news can be posted daily. The site also includes links to other local sites with valuable information about our community offering Blue Hill a quick and easy way to connect with our neighbors, our county, our history and our elected representatives."

Sadly, I agree with the anonymous commenter above. Unlike the Dorchester Times, this blog has not been adopted by our community. The community of Dorchester has 615 residents and their blog gets around 245 hits per day. Our community is closing in on 900 residents and this blog only averages 70 visits per day.

I have asked community members to join me as moderaters. I have repeatedly called upon the community to submit their news and views. Contrary to popular belief, my desire to be heard is not so overwhelming that I want to rant when I have nothing to say.

To my knowledge, I have no grudges to settle. I have no idea who I would be trying to get back at. I only intended to compliment our current sources of information about what is going on around us. The vast majority of Blue Hill's news has gone unreported. Not all the news is positive. This blog was not intended to report only the sunshine and roses of aBlue Hill. If there was not enough positive stories to balance out the bad news, I am sorry. I was hoping that others would help provide those stories.

Thank you to the readers of Blue Hill Today. Although this will be my last post, I would like to see someone else take up this task and will gladly provide anyone interested in managing this blog with the neccessary information to do so. If you are interested, just send an e-mail to bluehilltoday@hotmail.com. I look forward to seeing how this blog will grow or fade away under different moderaters.

Jesse Alber