As previously announced, earlier this month my Management Company purchased a majority interest in Lucky Dog Publishing. Lynn Pierotti will continue as a junior shareholder, publisher, and face for the Island Eye News, Island Connection and SIP magazine. In these days of social media, conspiracy theories etc., it did not take long to have some folks, including former elected officials, begin their conspiracy talks again.
To these folks I say—stop dividing us and work to unite us as one community doing things that are good for our quality of life. I had two motives—the first was well articulated by Lynn: The community paper is an endangered species and cannot survive as a stand-alone with no financial support. Our community papers, which are essential to a healthy community, survived last year by soliciting voluntary donations. This is not a viable long-term plan. The second reason I got involved was that non-island residents with a publicly stated opposition to a pro-island agenda were one of the finalists to buy the paper which would have been a disaster for us as a community.
First, a little background. My wife Renee, 11-year-old daughter Isabelle, and I are Isle of Palms residents. I have two older, grown children who live in Old Village, Mount Pleasant. After graduating from the Wharton Business School. I worked for Exxon Chemical for a decade before venturing off on my own, first by buying a small Exxon division and later by buying or starting up US based manufacturing companies focused on American jobs and investments. While our companies follow many simple principles for success, one common theme is “When in doubt, take the path of highest integrity.”
In keeping with that, effective immediately, Lucky Dog Publishing will stop accepting donations of any kind from elected officials and will not accept advertising dollars from companies where elected officials own a majority or controlling interest in the company. For the next five years, I will personally commit to not accepting any salary, dividend, or even expense reimbursement from Lucky Dog.
After we pay all our obligations, any remaining profit will be donated to the communities we serve. Also, I commit to never selling Lucky Dog at any time in the future to anyone who is not a resident of the communities served and who does not have the resident’s interests at heart. You may not always agree with your paper, but you should know that our heart will always be in the right place.
Finally, what is our vision for the paper? We are appointing a board that has national media, community paper, and finance expertise. This board will focus on three main areas—news coverage, community happenings, and transitioning to a new digital platform.
News must focus on facts on both sides of an issue and not ideology. Editorial opinions will appear periodically but clearly labeled as an editorial opinion and not a statement of facts. The paper cannot be a propaganda mechanism for elected officials but must be used as a community forum to hold elected officials accountable.
This is a founding principle of journalism, democracy, and freedom. Unfortunately, social media has let people become tigers hidden behind a screen where they demonize and teardown people they disagree with and attribute evil motives to people they have never met.
We cannot let this philosophy hijack journalism.
The foundations of a free society is free thought and speech. We should be able to disagree with another person’s opinion without attacking them personally which is destructive to a community and unfortunately freely practiced by a small group including former elected leaders.
Second, community involvement. The paper will move to include happenings in the community—a great island way of life picture, a story about a special family, fun golf stories, cooking stories and just sharing the wonderful life we all have.
We will set up the mechanism to facilitate this flow from the community. Finally, we need to move to a modern, digital platform starting with a new website in the next few months that is current, interactive and increases the effectiveness of our advertisers. We will always have a free community paper, but we will explore the addition of a digital subscription version with more in-depth stories, everyday happenings, weather, tides etc. that are “pushed” directly to people’s phones. This is also a way for the community to support the community newspaper that cannot survive, leave alone improve, with just advertising dollars even though we will promote our advertisers more actively.
In closing, I hope over the coming years, Lucky Dog can play a role in bringing communities together even though we do not always agree on everything. I also hope we can play a role in going back to the pre social media culture, which allows people to respectfully have different opinions and still be friends and work together for the common good.
