Dear Readers,

Thanks for stopping by our shiny new websites, www.boothbayregister.com and www.wiscassetnewspaper.com.

For the last few months, we have been working to get our online presence on line. I know we have a web page called the Porthole, but folks told us it seemed to be a bit behind the times. So we put on our thinking caps and built a new one. We hope you like it.

In this week's print edition, you will find advertisements plugging our sites. We tried to purchase other ads in the Lincoln County News and the Coastal Journal to let our friends know about our new site, but they said no. I guess our money was not good enough for them.

I am not surprised that the Lincoln County News refused the ad, as we are competitors. I was surprised that the Coastal Journal refused our money. After all, we are a little 5,000 circulation paper and they are three times our size. Their parent company is a lot bigger.

Remember, we are not asking for a favor. We are entering the American marketplace with a check to buy a commodity – advertising space in a newspaper. We didn’t ask for the family discount or the volume rate or the special rate they give to very special customers. We offered to pay the retail price. And we were turned down – flat.

After all, we are just doing what we tell our advertisers when we explain that newspaper advertising is great way to promote their business. We are not advocating a radical political cause that could cause great harm. We are not trying to plug a racy novel or a porno movie with a suggestive photo. No, we are just trying to buy an ad telling readers to visit our new website.

Now, we know the Coastal Journal is the low man on the totem pole for the giant Maine media empire called Maine Today Media. They are the big city guys who publish the state’s dominant paper, the Portland Press-Herald, along with the Kennebec Journal and the Waterville Sentinel. We also know that MTM and the Press Herald have been walking a financial tightrope and, until recently, were looking at Chapter 11 when they got a bit behind on their paper bills, and cleared out the executive suite. They survived when they got a bucket of cash from the husband of a big shot politician.

Wouldn’t you think they would be glad to accept our check for a full-page ad? After all, they need money and we are just trying to help them out. Oh well, maybe Goliath is a bit worried about David.

In the coming weeks, we will roll out new features for our readers and advertisers that we believe will augment the site. Please visit our site on a regular basis because we are putting new stuff online all the time.

For the record: No, we are not going to abandon the printed paper. We still love it and believe our readers do too. We know there is just something magical about holding a local newspaper in your hand.

The bottom line is we had to redo the website.

Along with providing up-to-the-minute coverage of breaking news and a seven-day option for readers who want to know about upcoming events and the characters that live next door, the new site gives us a reliable way to provide the news to our readers “from away.” The way we always sent the paper to our out of town customers is just not working very well.

You see, the local folks at the U.S. Postal Service do a great job delivering our papers to our friends who live in the neighborhood. But when we try to send the papers “away,” the out of town postal workers are not as good. Sometimes the papers are delivered a day or two late. Sometimes they are delivered a week late and sometimes it takes the Postal Service several weeks to deliver them, if they are delivered at all.

We have asked the Postal Service supervisors to investigate the problem and they always give us the same answer. It goes something like this: We checked into your delivery situation and found out we are doing everything right on our end. The problem is with the folks in another town, or another distribution point, or another sorting area. Sorry.

A few months ago, we attended a convention for New England newspaper editors. There, a big shot postal supervisor stood on a stage and told us that it was not the fault of the Postal Service that the Postal Service couldn’t seem to give us good service. The fault, he said, was with Congress or other political types. Then he said they had a plan to be more efficient and do a better job by closing a bunch of post offices and distribution centers. A lot of old-time editors just shook their heads.

Last week, a subscriber dropped into our office. She presented us with a list of our publishing dates and the dates they were delivered to her home. The story was the same. Her papers were delivered a week late, two weeks late, several weeks late. I thanked her for stopping in and told her we try to send them to her. The problem is with the U.S. Postal Service, I said.

She just smiled and said she understood. Then she mentioned that she knew all about the lousy service folks get from the Postal Service. “I am a letter carrier,” she said.

Joe Gelarden