A lot of people think I'm tough on City Council. Fact is: that's just not the case. Well, I'm not nearly as tough as I could be. I know lots of things I never tell and craft my stories in ways that do a lot less damage to Council than I could do. Take for example my recent story: Greensboro: Giving Incentives To Tax Delinquents, in which I pointed out that the City Council was considering granting $1.975 Million Dollars in incentive Grants to the developers of the downtown Wyndham Hotel.
I posted that story on the Saturday before City Council voted on Tuesday night. My intention was to push Council to vote no. Instead, George House, one of the developers of the project credited "some blogger" with forcing them to pay up $78,000 in delinquent taxes on Monday before going before Council on Tuesday night.
Council granted the incentives.
But what if I had waited until Wednesday to post that little tidbit of information? What if on Wednesday morning the headline of my post had been Council Gives $2 Million To Tax Cheats-- what then?
The shit would have hit the fan. I saved City Council's butts!
I can guarantee you that had I waited until Wednesday morning that by Friday morning the News & Record and every other local media outlet in town would have been reporting the story. As a matter of fact, it might even have gone statewide just as the story did when I broke the news about former Mayor Robbie Perkins' financial, IRS and divorce issues and Betty Cone's IRS problems with Grassroots Llc. And numerous others.
And then I would be all over the web leaving links back to my original story and driving up my readership because the mainstream media doesn't tell you where they get their stories, growing my audience and doing ever more damage to the Greensboro City Council than I've ever done before.
Almost every issue I take on is proactive but getting the most readers and doing the most damage politically requires a reactive approach. Had I taken a reactive approach from the beginning the very face of the Greensboro City Council might be different than it is today. That's not to say I'm not reactive but when it comes to issues I tend to get out in front of almost everyone else.
Maybe I should start approaching all my stories that way, after the fact instead of trying to prevent things before they happen, playing on public outrage and page views? Naw, even I'm too soft on City Council to do that.
Or am I?
