Mark Engebretson, editor of the Lake Country Sun, was in Fort Worth last weekend at a meeting of the North and East Texas Press Association. While he was there, he started getting calls about the fire that was now threatening Palo Pinto County and his Possum Kingdom Lake community.
Engebretson’s paper is published on Friday, but he didn’t wait for publication day to get ahead of the story. His Facebook page has been one of the go-new news sources for the Possum Kingdom area.
When Engebretson left for Fort Worth and NETPA, his Lake Country Sun’s Facebook page had 1,161 fans. At this writing five days later, he has 5,400 – and growing daily.
“The Web allows a weekly to become a daily,” Mark said. “Facebook takes you beyond a daily. It’s instantaneous communication.”
“This makes all the long hours worth it,” he said. “People tell me that they are really relying on us for up-to-the-minute news on the fire.”
The Sun is literally a one-man operation these days. The roads into Possum Kingdom are closed and Mark’s other staff just happened to be gone when the fire encircled the area. Now, he is doing it all himself – news, photography, advertising, design … everything.
The Sun’s offices seem relatively safe for the time-being, but Mark said that at one point the fire was across the street from him – “right up to the asphalt.”
And to make matters worse, the fire knocked out a wireless tower and the Sun’s office doesn’t have Internet service. Luckily, though, he can still make it back to his house, where he has a DSL line.
The West Texas fires are a great example of what social media can mean to community newspapers. People are not going to wait until “the paper comes out” to get their news, and the source that many are turning to now is Facebook. That medium is interactive, which means that readers can share information, ask questions, post pictures and video, check out rumors and talk back and forth in real time about their concerns.
“I have a whole new understanding and appreciation of Facebook,” Mark said. “Our readers have flat taken over our fan page.”
And that’s a good thing. PK readers see the Sun as the place to go for the latest news, a place to ask their questions and share their concerns. That respect for the newspaper as more than ink on paper but also as the community’s news source should pay off as those readers and advertisers look to the printed product for the expanded information and detail they can’t get on Facebook.