Local News, the Heartbeat of a Community, Needs Your Help!

To some, news is a four-letter word they don’t want to hear. However, it is this news that keeps our country great and allows our democracy to be the envy of the world. Yes, it is messy at times, and for good reason. Maybe it can even cause a feeling of helplessness and/or make you depressed reading the negative state of affairs we report, but news is essential to your freedom. That alone should make you feel good about taking that dose of news and supporting it in any way you can afford.  Because without the local news, our way of life will change for the worse. I assure you, that would be far more depressing.

So why support our publication over another? The answer is simple. If TBT were no longer able to remain in publication, the news and opinion pieces in our community would be without a competitive viewpoint. By having more than one news source, the community wins. It is not about competition for who gets the news out first, it is about different viewpoints and focus. Our investigative reporting and opinions provide a value you won’t find in any other local publication. We do this by diligent research of the facts, observing meetings, obtaining public records, and getting valuable input from sources. We are a source of news you can trust!

To provide the best local news source, we have pivoted to a new look, with more resources for the community. Our homepage has a different layout with more pictures and several additional news sections. There are obituaries, a calendar of events, world news, polls, comments from our subscribers, podcasts, and our new local business directory. We are the only local Manatee County news source that provides all of our news without a paywall and we want to keep it that way. This can only continue with your support.

We have hundreds of people paying our $7 monthly subscription. If you are reading this and have not subscribed please consider subscribing by clicking here now. If you have already subscribed, thank you for supporting local news and in reality supporting the continuance of democracy for our country. We also offer the following ways to support our publication with additional benefits:

• List your business in our business directory(the basic listing is free so no excuse not to do this by clicking here)
• Post your event on our calendar. If you have live music at your business, are having a charity event, sign-ups for baseball, soccer, or any other sport, or other community events, you can get more eyes on it (the basic listing is free so give it a try by clicking here).
• Classifieds are back! Having a garage sale, need to find work or need someone to work, have a repair business, home to sell, or other items of interest? Then let our classifieds get the word out. Prices start at only $10 – a great way to support local news and get your classifieds posted.
• Banner ads are like billboards and a great way to keep your name in front of thousands of people reading our publication.  We also have advertising opportunities within our podcasts and our emails. Click here for more information.
• Commenters must be a paid subscriber. This also helps keep the spam bots from attacking our site. This is a real issue. We want comments from real people, not some computer.

Here at The Bradenton Times, we have a simple motto “Fact-based news and analysis without an agenda!” Over the years, we have had some people, mainly elected officials, not so crazy about our reporting, making baseless claims that what we published was not factual. We have always requested that they show us anything we published that is not factual with the promise that we would correct it. To date, not one person has shown proof that what was published was not supported by the facts. This also provides reason enough to support our news publication. We bring a good dose of sunshine on what your government is doing. That is our focus along with other community news and of course Sunday Favorites (your local history brought to life).

For the past few years, our elected officials have not been looking out for your best interest as they favor their developers’ deep pockets to get them elected and keep them in office. Here are some of the stories and opinions we published that take a deep dive into the issues.

• OPINION - Ain't No Sunshine When She's Gone
• Who is Driving Comp Plan and LDC Changes?
• OPINION - County Commission Shows Public Who They Work For - Board votes 6-1 to gut wetland protections
• OPINION - Greenwashing at Its Finest
• A Closer Look at Van Ostenbridge's "Record Breaking" Fundraising
• OPINION -  Bait and Switch on County Administrator?
• Chairman Van Ostenbridge Purchased Detailed Voter Data with County Funds
• Residents Concerned with Plan to Widen 59th Street West
• OPINION -  Manatee County: Absurdity

Here is the reality. The heartbeat of our community is on life support. We need more reporters, not less, and we need resources to do this hard work. Please consider donating what you can in support of your local news. It is really easy, just click here and donate any amount.

If you are a business, also consider supporting our efforts through advertising, posting an event, and/or classified, and doing an enhanced paid business directory listing. To those of you who supported us in the past and are currently helping us out financially,  thank you. You have provided the resources to help get us to be a prominent news publication. However, we need your continued support along with that of others to keep that heartbeat we call local news alive. Together, as a community, we can set an example for other communities that we don’t need to be forced to pay for news by a paywall. We can demonstrate that a community can support local news voluntarily because it’s the right thing to do in order to protect and maintain our democracy and way of life.

Joe McClash
Publisher
The Bradenton Times

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