January 30, 2015
To Our Readers,
The Two River Times cares about this community.
We, like you, didn’t know the blizzard would fizzle but we did know that during a big storm a community comes together and it’s our job to bring you all the information you need in as timely a manner as possible. Our social media sites – tworivertimes.com and our Facebook Page Two River Times – were our best friends. So was Christina Johnson, our new social media editor, who started posting Monday morning and continued into the evening and all day Tuesday and today.
We posted news you needed to know beginning as soon as the storm was forecasted including weather maps tracking the predicted snowfalls. We posted from your grocery stores to tell you who still had milk and who didn’t. We posted parking regulations, curfews, and states of emergency and we posted from New York City as you tried to catch a ferry home. We went to your favorite watering holes, where many residents gathered to share the storm experience, and posted from there. We posted photos from our entire coverage area, pre-storm and post, including the digging out and the joy on the sledding slopes.
And it wasn’t just the news staff. Our executives and advertising sales staff pitched in as well. It was a “family” affair to bring you the latest news as it was unfolding and I thank each of them deeply.
We broadened that experience in our news pages today to tell you how your local and county officials, EMT, police, fire, and the organizations that care for our most vulnerable reacted. The news is they performed well. They were prepared for the worst and they adjusted when it was apparent that wasn’t going to happen.
Our elderly and less fortunate were safe, warm and fed. Our roads were closed and our shutters closed up tight. But when the state of emergency was lifted, our roads reopened quickly, our mass transit slowly got up to a “Sunday” schedule and life started to resume normally.
The forecast was wrong. The storm moved 50 miles east of what was predicted, and the consequences were clear. Gary Szatkowski, the top federal forecaster at the National Weather Service in Mount Holly apologized to key decision makers and the general public. So did every meteorologist on television. The computer models just weren’t accurate.
Restaurants, merchants and corporations lost business. Employees either enjoyed a day working from home without distraction or they lost a day’s wages. Others lost a vacation or personal day. But, the power stayed on and the kids had a ball. No school and enough snow for sledding and snowmen.
We knew covering a blizzard-gone-bad would be more work in the end for the staff because we have to provide you, our readers, a complete newspaper with substantive, non-snow storm news. That’s our job and we’re happy to do it.
Yes, some people were upset but the aftermath of the 2015 Blizzard Bust is this community grumbled, laughed and moved on. That’s why we care about it. This community has grit.
We undertook another new community effort this week is on our news pages. We redesigned Town Journal to make it more readable and visually appealing. So, when people aren’t battling for bread in the grocery store they can look at Club Meetings and Almanac for the information that reflects the very fabric of a community. That’s the concept of Town Journal and soon, there will be even more community news, topics and photos on those pages.
Why did we make the effort to post everything we could about the storm, bring you a deeper perspective in today’s new pages and redesign our Town Journal? Because community matters. You matter. And we’re trying to be the best source of local news available to you. Stay tuned, as we become an even better community.
Let’s Have Coffee!
Jody Calendar
Executive Editor/Co-Publisher
The Two River Times
732-219-5788
jcalendar@tworivertimes.com
