Opinion : VT: The one and only

… and then there was one.

When we started Vinton Today, we looked around the state, and the nation, to see if there were other online-only newspapers in Iowa, and the U.S.

We found one in Iowa: The Iowa Independent.

We found a few across America, as well. San Diego, Dallas and St. Louis all have online-only publications that began when newspaper staff reductions left a lot of experienced journalists out of work.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer is the first newspaper to go from a paper version to an online-only publication. It printed its last newspaper in March of 2009, a year before we began Vinton Today.

I still occasionally look at the online newspapers from the cities I mentioned above, especially the SPI, which has in its archives many columns by Mike Royko from the 1990s. I believe it is the only place to read Royko's work from that era, without going in person to Chicago.

But this morning I went to the Iowa Independent site.

It's gone.

The Iowa Independent site was a part of the American Independent (not to be confused with the American Independent political party) organization, which had separate online news sites in Iowa and several other states.

But this week, the management of American Independent simply shut down the network. Yesterday, I read about the changes on the Iowa Independent site. Today, the site no longer exists.

That means that as far as I can tell, Vinton Today is the only online-only paper in Iowa. We of course, are not the only online newspaper in our state. Almost every newspaper has some kind of web site, although many small-town publishers are afraid of putting too much news on the web site, thinking that it would harm the circulation of the printed newspaper. And there are companies who are trying to raise ad revenue by compiling various local newspaper web sites into one location.

But we are the only news source that is online-only. We have had a few requests for copies of our issues, but we have had to explain that there aren't any. Yet, because of our technology, every article ever published on Vinton Today is still available; feel free to print as many copies as you want, or forward the link to as many people as you wish.

I used to think that technology was the main reason Vinton Today has been a success. But when I saw the demise of the Iowa Independent, I realized that technology is only part of the formula. The other thing that a news organization desperately needs to succeed is local control.

At most newspapers, there is a boss (or a gang of bosses, in some cases) who do not live or work in the cities where their readers live.

I blew my stack, years ago during my days of working at a newspaper like that, at a meeting where one of those out-of-town bosses told me that the best way for me to compete against another publication was to tell people who submitted articles to us for the Vinton Palace or Vinton Unlimited that if they send articles to other publications, we would no longer publish them in our newspaper.

I said "No," although I used a lot more syllables during that discussion.

That's the kind of headaches that newspaper people have anytime there is a boss who does not live in their community or share their values.

And that's the kind of headache that killed the Iowa Independent this week.

It's also the kind of headache we don't have here at Vinton Today.

We (with lots of valuable submissions and suggestions from Vinton readers) decide what to publish every day. Nobody from anywhere else can tell us what to publish (or not to), or when to stop.

I have immensely enjoyed the freedom we have at Vinton Today since we began; today, I have one more reason to be thankful for that freedom.