A thank you to my readers as the Turner Report reaches another milestone

As of nine days ago, the Turner Report has been publishing for 17 years.

When I started this blog, I was less than two months into my first year teaching eighth grade English at South Middle School in Joplin after teaching four years in the Diamond R-4 School District.

I thought I had put reporting and opinion writing in my rear view mirror in the four years since my last newspaper job at the Carthage Press. Sometime late in 2000, I started a Turner Report website, but without any real method of getting the word out about it, it never drew more than 20 to 30 readers. Since I was teaching full-time and still a novice at that job, I finally stopped doing that first news website.

When the Turner Report was launched as a blog in 2003, I was not sure what I was going to write about, but I was keeping a promise to my students- since I required them to write every day, I would write every day, too.

So my early topics included a bit of everything from telling stories about events that happened years ago to reviewing books I was reading and movies I was watching to a few news items here and there.

Gradually, it developed into nearly all news and commentary.

I was still learning how to blog and the tools were nowhere near as advanced as they are now. I did not know how to do headlines, so I would just start writing. I often included several items in one post with no subheads, only asterisks, separating them.

It was almost impossible to read and my audience was small, but thankfully devoted.

For an incredibly long time, I had an average of 35 to 50 readers a day. I was beginning to break some stories, but they did not have much reach.

Still, I stuck with it and gradually, I developed a readership of a few hundred each day.

Looking back now, I have a hard time figuring out how it kept growing. I did not promote it much, because I did not know how to promote it. I told a few people about it and as far as I can tell, some of them read it, liked it, told other people and for the first few years word of mouth accounted for all of the blog's growth.

It was not making a cent for me.

I did it because I loved to write and I never put the news totally out of my system.

It was about five years or so into the blog's existence that the readership took its first giant step forward, and as usual, it was my students who pointed me in the right direction.

Introduction to social media

At that time, I was dabbling in the new social media and knew that I could do something with the network that was all the rage. I tried to figure out how I could turn MySpace into something that would draw attention to the Turner Report.

I heard my students talk about being on MySpace, so I joined and looked for a way it could be used to boost the blog, but never figured anything out.

Social media was a losing proposition.

Before I knew it, I discovered MySpace was a losing proposition, as well, and this new upstart social media network, Facebook, was the rage.

I checked it out and using the keen instinct that has served me so well over the years, I quickly determined this Facebook nonsense was not for me.

A few months later, I joined, but then almost totally ignored it.

Finally, I sat down one night and discovered that many of the people I knew, both from Joplin and from all of my former incarnations- Diamond teacher, newspaperman in Carthage, Lamar, Lockwood and Granby, going back to my days in the East Newton School District and playing and umpiring in baseball games in Granby and Stella, were on Facebook.

I added a few friends, I had people start adding me and as an experiment I placed links to some Turner Report posts and discovered a sizable increase in traffic.

Eventually, I linked to all of my posts and people that I never heard of began adding me as a Facebook friend, letting me know they had read some of my posts and wanted to see more.

Joplin Tornado

The next two major occurrences for the Turner Report came after the May 22, 2011 tornado when I made two big decisions.

The first one was an easy one- I decided to post every scrap of information I could find on the tornado. That brought in traffic from several directions- people who were occasional Turner Report readers, but were interested in tornado information began reading it regularly and many of you have maintained the habit since then.

I also picked up some extra traffic from some of the people who were reading the educational blogs I was writing for the national Huffington Post website, who read the essays I wrote on the tornado for that site, and checked out what I was doing on the Turner Report.

For this area, a major source of traffic came when Rebecca and Genevieve Williams began reposting my material on their invaluable Joplin Tornado Info Facebook page.

The second major decision was one I never expected to be a major source of traffic, but one I knew was the right thing to do.

I began publishing the obituaries of every person who died in the tornado.

This provided a clear look at the tragic toll the disaster had taken on Joplin.

By this time, the Turner Report was reaching, on average, 3,000 readers a day.

Inside Joplin and Beyond

Since the tornado, the Turner Report has gone through many changes, most of them based on the news, but some coming from necessity.

When the Turner Report began running a series of investigative reports on Texas con artist David Wallace and his firm Wallace Bajjali in 2012 even before the city of Joplin hired him as the city's master developer, the blog began an emphasis on offering more hard-hitting coverage of the decisions that were made following the tornado.

The following year after I lost my teaching job, there was no reason not to investigate the way the Joplin R-1 School District handled the tornado recovery.

By offering coverage of the continuing Wallace Bajjali debacle, the departures of former City Manager Mark Rohr and R-1 Superintendent C. J. Huff and the scandal surrounding former Mayor Mike Woolston, the Turner Report developed a following in Joplin that I have been fortunate enough to retain ever since.

When it became apparent that I was not going to be returning to teaching, I made the decision in November 2013 to launch a series of locally oriented blogs to provide a more complete news service and try to make a living from doing something I thoroughly enjoyed doing.

At that point I created Inside Joplin, Inside the Ozarks (now Inside Springfield), the Turner Resports and based on my experience after the Joplin Tornado, Inside Joplin Obituaries. The creation of those blogs was accompanied by the creation of the Inside Joplin Facebook page.

While Turner Resports has never been a major undertaking and Inside Springfield is more of a secondary blog, for nearly seven years I have worked on building Inside Joplin and Inside Joplin Obituaries.

The Turner Report covers investigative stories, follow-ups on news events, state news, politics and commentary, Inside Joplin offers more of a breaking news/bulletin board type of service. With Inside Joplin Obituaries, I have attempted to offer as many free obituaries as possible of people who are either from Jasper, Newton, Barton and McDonald counties, people who once lived here or people who have close relatives who live here.

As of this week, Inside Joplin Obituaries has posted more than 12,000 life stories.

The last few years have seen more courts and crime coverage on the Turner Report and Inside Joplin and a renewed emphasis on politics.

With the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic, I applied the same approach I used after the tornado, trying to publish every scrap of information I can find.

Turner Report/Inside Joplin as a business

In the years since Inside Joplin was created as a companion site to the Turner Report, I have worked toward making this little news operation into a paying proposition.

It has been frustrating to say the least. I have tried a little bit of everything and many of those efforts failed miserably (Does anyone want to take some Turner Report t-shirts off my hands?)

Through some perseverance, more patience than I ever thought I was capable of having and all of you readers, I have been able to reach a point where I no longer worry about whether I am going to have to give this up and try something more traditional.

Turner Report/Inside Joplin makes money in the following ways:

Advertising- Over the past several months, some of you who have commented that it is good to see local ads on the Turner Report. I totally agree with you, but I am not the one who is selling them, nor do I have anyone selling them for me. The ads are placed by the local companies and politicians through Google and are placed on my blogs because this blog features content about this area and has a growing readership locally.

My blog is also an Amazon affiliate, though I do not use Amazon ads often and when I do, it is usually to promote my own books.

NewsTex- For the past several years, I have had an agreement with a company called NewsTex, which culls writing from blogs across the United States and provides it to businesses that have an interest in it. While it has never been a major source of revenue, usually bringing in $10 to $15 a month, I have had occasions when I received $150 to $200.

Voluntary Subscriptions and Contributions- In late 2015, while still struggling to keep things going, I was listening to a news program on KRPS when it was interrupted for one of the station's frequent pledge drives and began wondering if that could work for the Turner Report/Inside Joplin.

I was pleasantly surprised when I set up the PayPal system, posted the idea and immediately began receiving subscriptions and donations. I wondered if this was going to solve all of my financial problems and turn the blogs into a real moneymaker.

As I suspected, the subscription boom did not last long. Many of you who subscribed back then have remained subscribers over the years and your support is deeply appreciated. Others have made donations from time to time and new subscribers have been added. I am grateful to all of you.

So at this point, the blogs, combined with revenue and royalties from my books, a teacher's pension and the riches that 22 years at low-paying newspaper jobs can bring you in Social Security, have put me in a position where I am now making about as much money as many professionals make.

Unfortunately, those many professionals are classroom teachers.

And that works for me.

I have been fortunate enough the past 43 years to never have a day when I was working at a job that I did not love. Your support has enabled me to keep that winning streak going.

Thank you.