The Sanatoga Post

WHY MORE PEOPLE LOSE THEIR HAIR – As enthralling as it often can be, sometimes technology breaks things that weren’t broken earlier. That’s what happened Sunday morning (Jan. 22, 2012) at The Sanatoga Post, which was offline from 12:35-9:01 a.m. because of technical problems discovered by our web hosting vendor, HostGator, in Texas. Because few Post readers speak Geek, we’ll define the problem simply as “a software issue.” The good news is, administrators and support personnel at HostGator (thank yous to Charles G., Javier O., Frank B., Daniel M., Sky Bly, John L., and Israel O.; really, it involved THAT many experts) 1) found the problem, 2) took us offline before other websites’ performance was affected, 3) made a phone call after midnight to alert us to the problem, 4) suggested solutions, 5) tested them, and 6) put us back online before too many readers could notice The Post was absent-without-leave. The Limerick Post, Pottstown Post, Main Street Post, Photos from The Post, and Travels with The Post editions of The Post Publications Network were unaffected.

Photo from Google Images

SANATOGA PA – The Sanatoga Post hopes you, its readers, will be its eyes and ears during Hurricane Irene’s march through Pennsylvania, by photographing and reporting storm-related events and activities you witness.

• Tree fall in your backyard, or on your street? Stay inside (don’t risk your personal safety in any way!), take a picture with your camera or cell phone, and sent it by e-mail to The Post at sanatoga@yahoo.com. Doing something fun with your family at home while the storm blows over (like an all-day Monopoly game)? Take a photo, and e-mail it to us as well.

• Got a funny, interesting, or heart-warming storm story to tell about you or your neighbors? Let us know by jotting a note on The Posts’ Facebook page, here, or our Google+ page, here. We’re looking to hear from you! And we’d be delighted, of course, if you “Like” us on Facebook or include us in your own Google+ circle.

• See breaking news that others should know about: road blocks, power outages and the like? Send Post Managing Editor Joe Zlomek a Tweet using Twitter (@jzlomek), or hashtag any storm-related tweets with #sanatogairene.

The Post wants to know, and tell the community about, your Hurricane Irene experiences. Keep us in the loop, won’t you?

Related:

• If It Happens Where You’re At, Let The Post Know!
• Batten Down The Hatches For Hurricane Irene

Photo from the Library of Congress

Managing Editor Joe Zlomek

SANATOGA PA – Items to keep readers up-to-date on what’s happening at The Sanatoga, Limerick, and Pottstown Posts:

Drag us into your Google+ (Plus) Circles

The tech-savviest of Post Publications‘ readers know that Google last month launched its competitive answer to Facebook, the Internet’s most popular social networking site. Google’s new weapon in the social media wars is called Google+ (Plus). It works much like Facebook, in some cases is a little easier to use, and in many cases provides a much cleaner and more graphically appealing interface, experts say.

• The Posts have Google+ pages; find them here.

• And The Posts have had a Facebook page for a couple of years now; find it here.

Because it’s a new kid on the block, so to speak, Google+ is building its user audience by issuing invitations to try the free service through those who already use it. Consequently, The Posts have available 150 invitations for its readers interested in starting their own Google+ pages. We’ll give ‘em away ’til they’re gone, but only one per e-mail address, please. If you want in, send your e-mail address to sanatoga@yahoo.com with the subject line “Google+.”

Once you’re up and running on Google+, we’d be delighted if you would add The Posts to one or more of your Plus Circles. They are groups of other users with whom you share friendship and information. That way we can keep each other better informed.

Take us with you when you go

When The Posts re-tooled their online appearance last November, thanks to some talented software programmers locally and beyond, we gained hundreds of new readers but lost the ability to present stories in a format easily seen on cell phones and other mobile devices. We are happy to report that – for the Sanatoga edition on iPhones, iPads, and Android- or HP WebOS-powered devices – our “gosh-that’s-fun” mobile interface returned in early July.

Simply open your phone’s web browser, type in “sanatogapost.com” as the desired address, and our software will automatically 1) take you to our website, 2) detect that you’re reading on a handheld device, and 3) serve up The Post’s phone-friendly look and feel.

For those of you with phones running other operating systems or reading the Limerick and Pottstown editions, well … we’re still working on them.

A Post milestone (or two) passed

The 4,000th news article produced for the Sanatoga edition was published last Friday (Aug. 5, 2011). The Sanatoga Post archives are so large that Google now serves up a category index for our stories in certain search results.

On the same day, The Limerick Post published article No. 1,153; and The Pottstown Post went live with article No. 1,116.

We thank our still-growing readership, contributors, media partners, advertisers, and community organizations with which we work for their trust in The Post Publications Network and their confidence in our products.

Another milestone just ahead

In two weeks (Aug. 25, 2011), the Sanatoga edition will observe its third anniversary and begin its fourth consecutive year of serving news and information to residents of Lower Pottsgrove (PA) Township, the Pottsgrove School District, and their municipal neighbors.

On similar occasions in the past, we’ve announced either new features or anticipated big improvements in what we’re doing or how we do it. Our goal for the coming year is, instead, “refinement.”

Readers tell us, almost daily, what they like about The Posts and also what they think needs fixing. We’ve now got an arm’s-length list of items that must be tweaked to work better and meet new demands. The improvements we hope you’ll notice on our pages during the next 12 months may be smaller in scale, but will pay off in greater usability and reader convenience.

And we’re hitting the road

The Posts have been invited to participate in the national “Block By Block Community News Summit 2011,” being held Sept. 29-Oct. 1 (2011) at Loyola University in Chicago. Block By Block bills itself as a conference at which “online community news entrepreneurs” can pick each others’ brains, trade ideas and learn new skills.

The Posts will continue to publish daily during the three-day period. Managing Editor Joe Zlomek expects to be bursting with enthusiasm when he returns from the Windy City.

HARRISBURG PA – Pennsylvania newspaper publishers fought hard Thursday (May 19, 2011) to keep revenue they earn by printing legal notices that municipalities like Lower Pottsgrove (PA) Township must display before passing laws, signing contracts, or buying equipment.

Publishers told the House Local Government Committee, during a hearing in Harrisburg, that proposed legislation which would allow legal notices to appear on websites instead of in local papers could cost thousands of reporters’ jobs. Government officials, on the other hand, accused publishers of simply trying to protect an advertising monopoly, The Pennsylvania Independent online news service reported.

• Read a story by reporter Darwyyn Deyo, titled “1,000 jobs hang in balance under PA publication proposal” and published Thursday by The Independent, here.

Headlines And Deadlines, the PNA newsletter

The Pennsylvania Newspaper Association (PNA), the publishers’ lobbying group, “would have you believe that townships just want to hide critical information,” said Elan Herr, assistant executive director of the Pennsylvania Association of Township Supervisors. “Instead, they will tell you only daily or weekly newspapers of general circulation can be trusted to provide this critical service, printing legal notices near the back of the paper at exorbitant rates.”

Township association members think they can save taxpayers thousands of dollars annually by putting legal notices where publishers themselves say their readers have moved: online.

Publishers have already heard – nine months ago from a Lower Pottsgrove resident – five suggestions on how they might better satisfy their municipal customers, keep the public better informed, and possibly save their battle for legal revenue.

Joe Zlomek of Sanatoga, former publisher and chief operating officer of The (Pottstown PA) Mercury newspaper and now managing editor of The Sanatoga Post and The Post Publications, was asked last year by PNA to offer his thoughts on promoting and using legal notices. In an article titled “Get your public to notice public notices,” which appeared in the Sept. 17 (2010) edition of PNA’s newsletter “Headlines And Deadlines,” Zlomek proposed that publishers:

• Train their readers by printing, on the newspaper’s front page, a daily text box that provides a short title for and a short description of each public notice published that day, and the page on which it appears. “Give it a week and people will look for it,” Zlomek wrote. “Give it a month and it can be as well read as the comics or the obits;”

• Digitally duplicate the same text box on their newspaper website’s home page, and permanently link each individual description directly to a corresponding notice online;

• Have their newsrooms write stories weekly that refer to legal notices. “Run a small feature … in print and online that describes and links to locally related, interesting, or quirky public notices published by your paper or by others, either within the same ownership group or (gasp!) among competitors,” Zlomek told publishers. “It helps your publication as much as the other guy’s;”

• Push more than paper by creating an Adobe Acrobat document (PDF) from each individual legal notice and providing the digital copy to legal advertisers for posting on their websites. “Municipal governments, in particular, will appreciate such service,” Zlomek wrote; and

• Notify legal advertisers by letting them know how newspapers were “adding value for the money … by giving greater exposure to this important advertising. Invite, and promptly reply to, (municipalities’) feedback and suggestions.”

To date few, if any, publishers heeded the advice.

NOW FOUR NATIONAL DISTRIBUTORS FOR POST CONTENT – Google News last week began offering selected articles from The Sanatoga Post as part of its Pottstown PA (zip code 19464) news feed. Two or three of The Post’s most read stories of the day usually appear in the feed within three hours of their 7 a.m. publication. Google joins Topix, NewsTex, and Fwix as national syndicators for articles and photographs published in The Post.

The Pulitzer Prize

NEW YORK NY – ProPublica, the non-profit online national news service with which The Sanatoga Post began working in July 2009 to track federal stimulus funding used in local highway projects, has won a 2011 Pulitzer Prize for a second consecutive year, it was announced Monday (April 18, 2011).

ProPublica reporters Jesse Eisinger and Jake Bernstein were awarded a Pulitzer for National Reporting for stories on how some Wall Street bankers at first delayed and then worsened the nation’s financial crisis. It marks the first time the prize has been given for a body of work not published in print.

• Read ProPublica’s winning series, “The Wall Street Money Machine,” here.

The Pulitzer Prizes are considered journalism’s highest honors. The (Pottstown PA) Mercury newspaper also has twice been a Pulitzer recipient.

SANATOGA PA – Prices for regular unleaded gasoline, according to the GasBuddy online database, ranged from between $3.49 to $3.56 per gallon during the past 48 hours across the 19464 zip code, including Sanatoga, Lower Pottsgrove (PA) Township, the borough of Pottstown, and Stowe.

Lowest local prices for regular were found in Sanatoga, GasBuddy’s volunteer spotters reported, with prices climbing as drivers traveled west toward Reading PA.

Access to the database, with searchable prices graphically displayed on a local map, is provided to The Sanatoga Post by GasBuddy.com, and is available in the bottom-right column on The Post’s Transportation archive page, here. GasBuddy is a popular Internet application for finding least-expensive gasoline.

SANATOGA PA – Constant Contact Inc., a Waltham MA-based provider of e-mail distribution services to more than 400,000 businesses, on Wednesday (March 16, 2011) named The Sanatoga Post and The Post Publications network as one of its 2010 All Stars. The honor is bestowed upon companies that consistently follow ethical e-mailing practices while enjoying high rates of recipient participation.

The Post has relied on Constant Contact since 2008 to deliver its daily headlines newsletter by e-mail, while giving readers the opportunity to take (“opt-in for”) or drop (“opt-out from”) the newsletter at any time, no questions asked. Constant Contact also employs strict delivery and anti-spamming rules to ensure readers’ e-mail addresses remain private.

As of Wednesday, the service had delivered more than 87,000 e-mails on The Post’s behalf.

• Not yet a Post subscriber? Don’t hesitate; the headline newsletter is free, and it takes only seconds to sign up! It’s so private, we don’t even ask for your name. Click here to get started.

Constant Contact also reported The Post’s rates for e-mail “opens” (representing messages actually read by recipients) and “click-throughs” (the number of embedded links readers clicked on to see content) were three to four times higher than publishing industry averages.

“Obviously, we’re honored by Constant Contact’s attention,” Post Managing Editor Joe Zlomek said. “It’s been clear from the launch of The Post that readers wanted the news we offered. And when we began the e-mail headline newsletter, readers also made clear it would be refused if it couldn’t be trusted, or if their privacy was violated. We’re happy to fulfill our promises on all counts.”

Fortunately, Zlomek noted, advertiser interest has followed reader interest. Since The Sanatoga Post began accepting advertising in November 2010, its number of advertising clients, the number of ads served, and the click-through rate for advertising response all have climbed monthly. “We’re pleased to be able to satisfy our sponsors too,” he said.

SANATOGA PA – The Sanatoga Post “story count” – the number of articles contained within its online archives – took a considerable jump during the weekend (March 12 and 13, 2011), due primarily to changes being made in other parts of The Post Publications network.

Managing Editor Joe Zlomek

When its daily headlines newsletter was delivered (free, of course) to Post subscribers on Friday morning (March 11), the Sanatoga PA edition contained 3,482 articles published since Aug. 25, 2008. By Sunday night (March 13), the archives had swelled to 3,569 articles. That’s an increase of 87 stories – or about 17 days’ worth of publication – in fewer than three days … which deserves a bit of explanation.

The same “look and feel” and, more importantly, improved features introduced last November (2010) in The Sanatoga Post are now being created for its companion news services east and west of Lower Pottsgrove Township: The Limerick (PA) Post and The Pottstown Post. With luck, the revamped Pottstown and Limerick editions will launch in a few weeks.

The Main Street Post, our business-news-only publication, is being similarly revised, and we are pleased to announce here that two other Post editions are in the planning stages. If and when they launch – such things take time and capital – the network would encompass a total of six publishing units.

As part of this growth, local news content created by Post Managing Editor Joe Zlomek since 1998 is being moved from other websites to the Sanatoga, Limerick and Pottstown editions as appropriate.

These transfers don’t have an immediate impact on readers, but they do add greater historical depth and context to much of the news covered here daily. Probably to no one’s surprise, some problems that pestered our coverage areas 13 years ago still linger today. For readers searching our archives on specific topics – Pottsgrove School District budget battles of years past, for example – the additional stories may help to enhance understanding of those problems.

Our weekend work represents just the first wave of transfers. Ultimately, we anticipate adding several hundred more back-dated stories across all three publications.

The Post is fortunate to be working with extremely talented local people and businesses as it grows. Among them is Convergent Cloud Solutions, a Pottstown-based company headed by France Krazalkovich. His firm is modifying some of the behind-the-scenes coding that will make our relaunched websites jump through hoops to meet readers’ needs.

We’ll keep you informed of developments on this end as they occur. Until then, as always, we thank you for reading The Post.

POTTSTOWN PA – “Recommendation to approve settlement agreement with former student as presented.”

That was the entire text of “Business Item A” as it appeared on the agenda, and ultimately was unanimously approved, during Tuesday night’s (March 8, 2011) meeting of the Pottsgrove School District Board of School Directors at Lower Pottsgrove Elementary School. For the record, that’s also all the public will – for now – be allowed to know, according to board President Michael Neiffer.

Board President Michael Neiffer, left, and Solicitor Kyle Berman during an earlier meeting.

“What’s this about?,” Sanatoga Post Managing Editor Joe Zlomek publicly asked before the vote was taken.

Its “details will not be discussed at this meeting,” Neiffer replied, in his best basso profundo voice.

• What was the nature of the disagreement between the former student and the district?
• What prompted the district to either make or accept a settlement proposal?
• Does the settlement agreement carry a cost to the district?
• If so, how much and over what period of time?
• How has whatever situation that caused the apparent problem been fixed by the district so it does not happen again?

Those were questions Zlomek hoped to have the board or administrators answer without divulging the names of the former student, school employees or contractors, school building, or other confidential specifics of the apparent problem that legitimately are covered by law or district privacy policies. Both exist because, occasionally, there’s some information the public or media has no right to know.

It is possible answers to some of those questions just couldn’t be provided without breaking confidences, or couldn’t be offered in the time allotted to conduct board business. If either was the case, Neiffer gave no explanation. Solicitor Kyle Berman acknowledged, however, that the cost of the settlement to the district – a cost borne by its taxpayers – was indeed information that could be released publicly … if it was available.

Is it available?, Zlomek asked the president. “I don’t have it before me,” Neiffer said. Does that mean, Zlomek persisted, that the president was ready to vote on the issue even if he didn’t have facts like its cost handy? “I’m absolutely prepared to vote on this,” Neiffer replied.

He called for the vote. School board members, who were otherwise silent during the discussion, all said “aye” in favor, and moved on to “Business Item B” of their agenda.

Director Philip Keogh was absent and did not vote.

Related (to the Pottsgrove Board of School Directors’ meeting of March 8):

• For Pottsgrove’s Record, You Don’t Need To Know This
• MCIU Budgets On Pottsgrove Schools Agenda Tonight