We came, we saw…and we left empty-handed!
As expected, we fell at the last, beaten into a distant second place by the unquestionably excellent The Construction Index. While we never honestly expected to win, we were of course disappointed; mainly because we never got to air our heartfelt and spontaneous acceptance speech.
So, rather than letting it go to waste, here’s what we might have said (if we’d won and if we’d actually bothered to write a speech):
“…I would like to thank the readers of DemolitionNews.com, without whom I wouldn’t be standing here today. Our website was designed in part to provide demolition professionals with a faster, more reliable source of relevant and timely information. And in the two and a bit years we have been in operation, we have more than achieved those aims, establishing DemolitionNews as the industry’s most widely read news resource.
Another key reason for starting the website was to prove a point. To prove that publishing, good journalism and audience interaction DOES NOT necessarily require the backing of a large publishing company. Rather, in today’s audience-led, web-based world, all that is required is consistently good content. Content attracts and retains readers; readers attract and retain advertisers; advertisers allow us to reinvest in content….everyone wins.
The fact that DemolitionNews is produced (literally) by one man and his dog (who you can often hear snoring in the background of our audio podcasts), I think, underlines that the stranglehold of the major publishers is being broken. Thanks to the Internet, readers now have direct access to news that is important to them and that hasn’t been filtered by an editor who may or (more often) may never have worked in the industry about which they now claim a degree of expertise.
DemolitionNews was the brainchild of myself and Institute of Demolition Engineers’ new president John Woodward. And what started as a throwaway conversation has blossomed into a news portal with an expending and incredibly loyal readership that spans the world in just a few short years.
I am incredibly proud of what we have achieved so far; we’re incredibly proud that our readers keep coming back and that they have voted for us; and you (and they) can rest assured that we’re not finished yet…”
