Names and faces change, both those in this newspaper, and those producing it.
The community institution serving Bladen County for more than a century endures. And it will again.
Today and this edition is the last for Alan Wooten, who began here in July 2018. He moves on to a role as a national managing editor with Franklin News Foundation, an innovation nonprofit media company built to address the many challenges of sustainable public journalism.
The Bladen Journal will continue as a trusted and reliable source of news and information in this county. That didn’t begin when he got here, and it certainly won’t end as he leaves.
Readers trust us and our staff to include reporters, advertising representatives and administration to do our best to deliver.
We’re tasked on our news and sports pages to share the truth, to tell about Bladen County. We seek to acknowledge those things which are most important, most interesting and most useful to the audience as told through the keystrokes of our staff.
No copy and paste voices of others, like a bulletin board. No opinion mixed among byline stories unless so noted as analysis, or by the column sig of the journalist. This, the Opinion page, is where the commentaries are kept.
To partially borrow from the great humorist Samuel Clemens, who we all know better as Mark Twain, any talk of our demise is greatly exaggerated. We’re challenged like just about every industry in the country, and this newspaper will again meet that challenge.
We are vastly stronger in many ways today as compared to a year ago at this time, or any point before that.
Print subscriptions — an element that has fallen dramatically for national chain newspapers, of which we are not — for us have remained fairly steady. We need more subscribers, but those we have are sticking with us and in some cases we’ve added a few.
Our digital audience, meaning those that read us through our companion website BladenJournal.com, are far greater today than just a few short years ago.
More people read us and see our advertisers now than ever before. Ever.
The increases aren’t tied to sensationalized stories that skew the figures; rather, we’re steady as she goes month to month with the occasional rise from a story of particular importance.
In each of the N.C. Press Association’s last three competition years, BladenJournal.com has been named the state’s best for breaking news coverage and second-best for General Excellence in websites among its peers. The newspaper has won 26 awards — across print, internet and advertising — in a three-year span, an unprecedented run here.
We offer a commitment the whole year to our community. We do it because we care as much as anyone about Bladen County. And as we’ve said here before, things good for this county are good for all of us.
The names and faces change. The commitment will always be strong from Your Favorite Good Morning Newspaper.