by Jim Langan

It’s not often a weekly newspaper like ours makes national news. It’s virtually impossible to compete with cable and the Internet when you only publish once a week. But last Thursday, we were definitely an exception to the rule.

After hearing conflicting information and dozens of rumors for months, we zeroed in on some hard information regarding the upcoming wedding of Chelsea Clinton.

So very early Thursday morning, we issued a press release identifying Astor Court in Rhinebeck as the location of the much-talked-about wedding of Chelsea Clinton.

The release hit the search engines and wire services and within minutes, our phones began ringing off the hook from media around the country. CNN, Fox News, The Washington Post, The New York Post and countless other outfits jumped all over the story. It probably didn’t hurt that it was Thursday before the Fourth of July and there wasn’t much going on in the world. We even had an inquiry from Bahrain.

Who knew people cared so much about such things? Most people simply wanted to know how we knew and who are sources were. Well, you wouldn’t be in the news business long if you ratted out your sources every time you had a scoop. We simply told everyone we were confident we had it right and we did. Our information came from a variety of local sources, all unrelated with no ax to grind.

Unlike the shameless Poughkeepsie Journal, which made a pathetic attempt to claim the scoop as their own, we didn’t cite any “anonymous sources with knowledge of the event.” We did our homework and put it out there when we were confident about the information.

We also found it interesting how many media outlets just went with the story without any attempt to verify the source. We got the feeling we could have said “Charles Lindbergh spotted lunching in Millbrook” and some media would simply have moved the story along. But it was an exciting few days but now it’s back to normal with interviews, town board meetings and community news. We hope you enjoyed seeing your hometown paper getting a little exposure as much as we did.