Dear Readers,

Last week, Boothbay Harbor lobsterman Ryan Casey was hauling his traps off Damariscove Island when he ran across a huge shark feeding on the remains of a minke whale.

When he pulled out his smartphone and captured video of the shark, he earned his 15 minutes of fame. Within hours, that shark became a toothy example of how my world has changed.

Casey said he thought it was a great white shark, you know, the mighty sea hunter profiled in the movie “Jaws,” but he wasn’t sure.

“I don’t know if it was a great white, but I know it was a great big shark. It was probably 15 feet long,” he said.

After we heard about the sighting, our staff got in touch with Casey. He and his wife Heather were kind enough to bring in his phone so reporter Ryan Leighton could download the shark video and edit and upload it to you via our website.

The morning of Friday, August 2, we posted it and Sue Mello, one of our fine reporters, made a few calls. Based on Casey’s description, she wrote a story for our website saying it might have been a GWS. Later, a shark expert looked at the video and confirmed that it was a great white.

To give you an idea of the speed of communications of today’s world, the story was sent to hundreds of our readers via our “Daily Catch” feature. We shared the story with our friends at the Wiscasset Newspaper and the PenBay Pilot.

Almost immediately other folks started to notice it.

An hour or so later, at 10:30 a.m., the Bangor Daily News picked up the story, posted the shark video and were kind enough to credit Ye Olde Register and of course mention Casey. The Portland Press Herald and its sister papers the Kennebec Journal and the Waterville Sentinel followed suit at 12:17 p.m.

Over in TV land, a Bangor TV station saw the BDN story and called the news desk at ABC News in New York City. About 15 minutes later, a nice woman named Erin Donovan from ABC News called me and asked if it would be OK if they used the shark video. Of course, I replied, but asked if they would give credit to Casey and your friends at the Boothbay Register.

She said they would send it out to all their affiliates nationwide.

After lunch, Portland’s WMTW Channel 8, an ABC affiliate, called asking if they could have a copy of the video and said they were on their way to Boothbay to chat with Casey. They later ran the video and credited Casey and the Boothbay Register. WGME Channel 13 also used the video, but they didn’t give your favorite newspaper any credit for putting it up in the first place.

Portland’s WCSH, Channel 6, ran the video and came back on Monday to do another story featuring charter boat skipper Dan Stevens.

I tell you about this episode to give you a glance at how the news world has changed in the last dozen years. Tiny papers like Ye Ole Register are now shooting video and posting it on their websites. Statewide papers are taking notice and the national networks are on the lookout, too.

Since that time, nearly 34,000 folks have read the shark story on our websites alone.

Friends, it is a brave new world. Today’s computers, smartphones and 24-hour news cycles seem a thousand miles away from the news business I grew up in. That was a business that issued you a handful of copy paper and a big black pencil and told you to find a story. Then you wrote it on an ancient Royal typewriter and the rest was history.

It has all changed.