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Mike Fak - Guest
Speaker at Mt. Pulaski Rotary Club Mike Fak, Editor and Chief Operating Officer of the LDN (Lincoln Daily News On-Line), was guest speaker at Mt. Pulaski Rotary, yesterday. Mike punctuated his remarks with humorous anecdotes as he presented the advantages of on-line media, and most particularly the advantages of a local on-line newspaper media, which can be up-dated at will throughout the day according to breaking news in the Logan County area. Mike related that on a typical day, there will be 50-100 new color photos and over 100 fresh new articles, which, if ran off on a home printer, would consume a ream (500 pages) of paper. Mike printed out the front page of an old LDN edition and taped it together, which held it up to reveal that it was about 6 ft in length – front page, only! However, since January of this year, LDN has compartmentalized the daily edition so that the front page is no longer nearly as lengthy. Instead, there are now Community, Top Stories, Obituaries, Business and Sports sections. It “goes to press” every morning except Sundays at 8:00 am, sharp, with up-dates throughout the day. Fak went on to say that there are over 9000 visits per day, which are individual computers as each computer has its only IP (Internet Protocol) address and multiple visits by the same computer only counts as one visit. This means that, clearly, way over 10,000 people are looking daily at the LDN On-line newspaper as often more than one person shares the same computer. Mike told us that last year was the biggest revenue year for LDN and this year is currently running 30% above that (both readership and advertising). He revealed that he’s had emails from every state of the union and many many foreign countries, including service men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere. He noted that his email server receives on the average of 11,000 emails in a 3-month period. Interestingly, Fak said that there are eleven (11) years of archived articles accessible for free at the LDN On-line at any time. Mike was happy to announce that his LDN outlet routinely turns down requests for advertisements from outside of Logan County – he and his publishers, the Youngquist family, wish to keep this news outlet a Logan county outlet.
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