Over the line?

Chris, God bless 'im, helped me keep my sanity today. Thank the Lord for telephones.

As many of you probably know (since apparently only co-workers and heterosexual life partners read this), I'm now editor of Connect Statesboro, a weekly arts and entertainment publication put out by the Herald.

On October 1 I go to doing just that, but right now I'm running myself ragged splitting my time between straight journalism and getting Connect out the door every week.

Our first issue came out Thursday before last. I should have figured it would draw a response from The E11eventh Hour, the "other" arts and entertainment tabloid in town.

They're bi-weekly, we're weekly. They also focus on news, we have a daily newspaper for that. They have a staff of non-professional journalists, we have... uhm, pretty much me, one columnist, and my executive editor at the Herald helping out (as well as the occasional reporter I can rope in).

Brad Evans, publisher of The E11eventh Hour, called us out in their edition this week. He accused the Herald of ignoring the entertainment scene for years, seeing an opportunity to cash in, and doing the big, bad corporation thing.

He also drew parallels to the Macon Telegraph's attempt to compete with the Macon edition of his publication.

What was over the top (to me, anyway), though, was the cartoon they put on page 9 of their illustrious (and suddenly re-designed, hmm....) rag. It featured a caricature of the typical corporate "fat cat," with copies of the Herald and Connect Statesboro on his desk, surrounded by piles of money and smoking a cigar whilst reading The E11eventh Hour.

Didn't even look like our publisher, except for the piles of cash.

After grabbing a delicious chicken sandwich loaded with fast-acting triglyceride sedatives, I gave ol' Brad a call.

I pointed out to him that yes, we're in it to make money, just like he is. I told him that I saw advertisements in his publication, too.

I also told him that we'd had a weekly entertainment page for two years, so we were hardly ignoring that aspect of Statesboro life. Hell, I'm part of the Statesboro scene. How many local gigs has he played?

He didn't seem too interested. In fact, he kept saying that since we put our publication out right by his, we had to expect them to make fun of us.

He even said we try to look like him. No, I told him, we try to look like our well-established sister pub, Connect Savannah. He said that Connect Savannah looks like The E11eventh Hour. We're all printed in tabloid format, but Connect Savannah's been around far longer than his rag.

Here comes the stuff I didn't get to tell him, since he writes a good game but talks a very scared one:

Yeah, Brad, I kind of expected it from the maturity you guys have shown through your three years. In a meeting over a month ago, I brought up the question of whether we should acknowledge The E11eventh Hour's existence in our pub.

We decided not to. We took the high road. We're going to continue to take the high road. Every time you mention us, it just means one or two more people who wonder "what is this 'Connect' that has them so freaked out?"

So keep on attacking us. Your hasty redesign this week shows that you know we look better than you do.

I hope both publications can survive. You're right, the competition will make us both better. But if you go down, I won't shed a tear. Heck, I might have an opening or two.

And this isn't Macon, Brad. If you want to beat us, you'd better give your kids some lessons in basic journalism and layout. Maybe it wasn't that you beat the Telegraph, but they decided you weren't worth their time.

Y'know, you've convinced me to work that much harder to make sure we beat you to the punch on the big stories every single time.