Daily Archives: July 2, 2012

Your Virtual Front Page, Monday, July 2, 2012

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Kind of a mushy news day, but some interesting stuff:

  1. GlaxoSmithKline ‘guilty of fraud’ (BBC) — Not usually the sort of thing I’d lead with, but it’s about the hardest news going.
  2. Peña Nieto: Mexicans have given party a second chance (The Guardian) — Yep, I had to look to a British publication for well-played coverage of the election in the country that shares a huge and porous border with ours. As usual.
  3. US Justice Department again nixes SC voter ID law (AP) — And so it is that more human energy is wasted on this more or less pointless battle between the parties.
  4. Experts find ‘God particle’ … sort of (AP) — Scientists expected to say they’ve found evidence of the particle, even if they haven’t seen the particle itself. Sounds kind of like the scientific equivalent of seeing a burning bush. Or something. I’m not the one to explain it.
  5. Romney campaign, at odds with GOP, says mandate is not a tax (WashPost) — This is the freakiest development of the day. Essentially, Romney’s campaign is agreeing with Obama, and refusing to go along with the gathering Republican consensus on the Excuse of the Day for hating Obamacare.
  6. Anderson Cooper says he’s gay (NYT) — I’m sort in an SDII position on this one, in that I only halfway know who Anderson Cooper is (I knew he was a TV guy with white hair). Frankly, I thought the reason he gave in this report for not talking about his sexuality ere now a good one. But nobody’s asking me.

So is fishin’. And eatin’. And watchin’ TV…

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This morning, I saw something that made me feel good, in advance, about any tag lines or campaign themes I might come up with for ADCO this week.

“Huntin’ is good!” it insisted. Not just hunting, but huntin’, which I suppose is meant to convey a certain deep and informal intimacy with this particular activity.

What really grabbed me was the registered trademark symbol, which seemed to assume that this phrase was just so darned clever that it was inevitable that some unscrupulous varmint would be tempted to try to steal it…

But I declare, I don’t believe I’ve ever run across anything as vanilla as that in my life. There was no indication why huntin’ was good, or why anyone might think it wasn’t. It didn’t say it was particularly good in this or that locality, or at any particular time. Nor did it bother to reach for any adjective more descriptive or precise or evocative than good.

It was a marvel, and I had to look it up on my phone during the morning meeting at work. That’s where I found this website, huntinisgood.com, which offers all sorts of merchandise, such as the very decal I had seen.

The website seems dedicated to perpetuating the art or hobby or whatever of hunting at a time when the number of hunters is dwindling in our once rugged, intrepid nation of pioneers. I had known that. I had read before about how the industry was worried about how few children of hunters were taking up their forefathers’ outdoorsiness, and how marketers were trying to entice the kids, as well as women, to the pasttime with such innovations as pink rifles.

But I had never seen such a full litany of threats to hunting as what were detailed on this site:

Hunting Industry Under Attack

Tracking Down An Industry-Wide Problem. Across the United States, and for well over three decades, the population of hunters in our country has been on the decline. Since 1975 alone, the number of hunters in the field has been reduced by over one third.

Since the issue of attrition within the hunting community has only recently become a cause for serious concern, usable research is still limited. But just as writers, industry experts and retailers all speculate on the causes, we have developed our own list of suspects which have created a negative impact on the hunting culture.

Erosion Of The Family Unit. With divorce rates and single parent families on the rise, the number of Dads and Grandfathers in a position to mentor our youth, and pass on an appreciation for the hunting culture, are dwindling fast.

The Anti-Hunting Community. Highly organized, with seemingly unlimited budgets, their goal, simply put, is the elimination of the hunting industry.

The Lure Of Technology. These days, our children are “jacked-in” to video games, hunting only in Cyber Space. They’ve become masters of Wi-Fi and pixels, not the way of the woods.

Industry Fragmentation. We have evolved into a highly fragmented industry… bow hunters, turkey hunters, rifle hunters, safari hunters, duck hunters, muzzle-loaders, gator hunters, low-fence, no-fence, high-fence… it’s all become a lot of nonsense!

One thing we can all agree on 100% is that:
Huntin’ Is Good!®

The day is fast approaching when we all must decide a course of action, or face the reality that our industry, and the way of life it represents, may become extinct.

It’s time we draw the line! The Hunting Tradition, and its’ Way of Life, needs your help! Please wear your HIG gear soon and often. This will let other’s know, what you already know, Huntin’ Is Good!

Whoa. Huntin’ may or may not be good — I’m neutral on that point — but it certainly seems endangered. Either that, or paranoid. (Of course, if some outfit as ominously named as the Anti-Hunting Community got after you, you’d be paranoid, too!)

I’ve never gotten into it myself. I like to go out shooting now and then with my uncle in Bennettsville, who does hunt, but I prefer to shoot at tin cans and pine cones to living things. On account of the fact that pine cones don’t have to be skinned and dressed and butchered and put up in some freezer bigger than the one I have at home. They’re just a lot less trouble.

A new record — thanks for reading, & keep it up!

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I’m still sort of scratching my head, trying to figure out what went right, but the blog set a new traffic record in June — actually, it blew the old record away.

The old record was 272,417 page views, set in January. That was understandable. It was the month of the SC Republican presidential primary. The record month on my old blog — the one I had at the paper — was set in January 2008. Interestingly, that record was only about 85,000 page views. I continue to marvel that my readership is so much greater than when I had my name on the masthead of South Carolina’s largest newspaper ever day. Such is the power of social media, I suppose.

It took me three years to log my first million page views. Now, I’ve done better than that in the last four months (1,023,091, to be exact). Or perhaps I should say, we’ve done better. Our growing community of regular contributors are a solid part of the blog’s appeal, based on anecdotal evidence.

News that draws in readers from outside SC — such as presidential primaries — always means a bump in traffic. For instance, the first time I drew a quarter of a million page views was the month that Alvin Greene and the allegations against Nikki Haley broke nationally — June 2010. It was a long time after that — August 2011 — before I exceeded that mark again.

Now, it’s well on its way to becoming routine.

So what was the number in June? It was 282,271, which beats January’s record by almost 10,000. Actually, it was more significant than that, because it was a 30-day month going up against a 30-day record. The daily average page views in June was 9,409, as opposed to 8,787 in January. In other words, if there had been 31 days in June, the total would have been more like 291,680 — closer to 20,000 over the previous record.

So what’s causing this? I don’t know, other than that readership is just steadily ratcheting up. Looking back, I see nothing in June that would have drawn much national attention — in fact, nothing much at all out of the ordinary.

So all I can say is, thanks for reading. And please keep it up.