HAPPY BIRTHDAY: New Rochelle’s Talk of the Sound Turns Two

Talk of the Sound turns two today.

To all our readers and contributors…thank you!

It has been a great run and our third year looks to be our best one yet. Over the course of the past two years, Talk of the Sound contributors has broken many, many stories and helped to establish newrochelletalk.com as the “go to” site for what’s really happening in New Rochelle. Each month, Talk of the Sound publishes more original reporting on New Rochelle than any other media outlet in the United States. We monitor every mention of “New Rochelle” on the web and link to stories from the Journal News, Sound & Town Report, Channel 12 News, the AP, blogs, Twitter and every other possible source. If there is a mention of New Rochelle online, originating from anywhere, we review and link the most important stuff. Every “New Rochelle aware” person in the City reads the site (whether they admit it or not) and the stories on the site are often widely discussed around town. We will save a list for our annual “year-end review” in December but suffice to say Talk of the Sound has brought about changes to how the City operates. The problems have not gone away by a long-shot but at least some of the bad guys are starting to think twice before dipping their hands into the public till.

We have some good things planned for Year 3.

Recently we announced moving the site to a bigger, more robust web server. We have also signed a deal with a consulting firm that will help us put in place a web-based advertising program to support the site. We are adding more resources and will increase the amount of “straight news” reporting on the site. The site itself is going to change significantly and we will be expanding the language capability of the site to include Spanish with the ability to automatically translate between English to Spanish and Spanish to English so everyone can read every story regardless of which language it was originally published in. We are also working on a citizen media event to be held here in New Rochelle that will attract citizen media site operators and reporters from around the region to help catalyze the already burgeoning citizen media “ecosystem” throughout the Lower Hudson Valley region.

Looking back at the numbers — over 300,000 visitors, close to 1 million page views, over 800 registered users, thousands of blog posts and comments — the results of this effort have been gratifying. In case it was not apparent, it takes a lot of work, every day, to run the site. It would be impossible without the many efforts of a wide range of people, many of whom have become known in the community through their own efforts on this site. To all of those regular contributors who have developed their own following on the site — a special thanks.

The sad thing is that most people who contribute, directly or indirectly to Talk of the Sound, do not want to publish under their own name or be publicly associated with their effort. What does it say about New Rochelle that so many residents are afraid of their government and their Board of Education? Thomas Jefferson said it best.

“A government afraid of its citizens is a Democracy. Citizens afraid of government is tyranny!”

For too long, the corrupt and the unjust have held sway in New Rochelle, spending our money recklessly and stealing whatever isn’t nail down with impunity. Caught stealing from the City of New Rochelle? Keep your job. Caught working a no show job and pleading guilty to grand larceny? No jail time. Transmitting nude images of a 15-year old student through the school district? Get a promotion.

As a local wiseman recently told me about corruption in New Rochelle, “no one is sayin’ nothin’ because everyone’s got somethin’ on everyone”

For too long, New Rochelle has played out like that final scene in Roman Polanski’s classic film noir homage…

“Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.”

Well, we’re not going to forget it anymore. Slowly, with Talk of the Sound contributors and readers leading the way, we are starting to see the turning of the tide. Somewhere out there, maybe in the very near future, many further off, there is a tipping point we are moving towards in New Rochelle where our City Council, our Board of Education, our City Administration and our School District Administration will come to fear residents in the same way they have caused residents fear. The solution is transparency, accountability, open government. That means ready access to government records, broadcasting every government meeting and school board meeting on TV and archived for posterity on the web, that means prompt compliance with the New York State Freedom of Information Law, compliance with New York State Open Meeting Law, the publication of public records online, for free, and organized in a way as to make accessing them as simple and intuitive as a Google search (no more PDF files!).

For those who have joined in, thanks. For those sitting on the sidelines, join us. Help take back our City.

In case there way any doubt, here is the traffic history for Talk of the Sound since September 1, 2008. Unfortunately, there is no one single chart in Sitemeter that shows the monthly data for unique visitors going back two years so I cobbled together three charts, each on a different scale to give a close approximation of what the data looks like and gives a very clear idea of the growth rate of Talk of the Sound. I think you get the idea.

NOTE: The big jump in July 2009 was a result of having two stories that got picked up by the national blogs and generated a lot of traffic (the School District adopting BMI standards and the arrest of Demetrius Hazelton for using a “Dave Chappelle” white man voice).