thebatavian

Longtime readers may remember I didn't work for a day or two in the summer of 2009 because of cataract surgery.

That was for the right eye.

That worked out pretty well because it made my right eye -- my camera shooting eye -- a perfect 20/20.

Now it's time for the left eye.

I go into UMMC this morning to have Dr. Li from University Eye replace my left lens with an implant that will bring to an end the foggy, triple vision of that eye.

Today, I'll be pretty much out of commission. Tomorrow, I'll take it easy. I expect to be shooting Notre Dame's basketball game in Buffalo on Saturday.

We have some coverage lined up for today -- including a couple of stories I actually wrote last night that will self-publish later this morning.

Billie will be around, of course, listening to the scanner (not that we have totally locked in the county's new system yet).

Lisa Ace will be holding down the fort in the office today, handling any site sponsor needs.

BTW: I've got to tell you what I think is a pretty amazing story, a modern miracle, from my visit to University Eye a few weeks ago. All summer and winter, my vision had been declining, even in my right eye. It turns out, the lens was fogged over. Dr. Li used a laser for less than 60 seconds, just a few zaps, to clear the cloudiness away. Within an hour of leaving the office, I was back to 20/20 again. The sudden change in vision felt quite literately like scales falling away from my eyes. Modern technology can just be so amazing some times.

I'm looking forward to being 20/20 in both eyes for the first time since I was about 14.

It was five years ago today that Billie and I took over ownership of The Batavian.

The Batavian began May 1, 2008 as a project I headed for Fairport-based GateHouse Media, but at the end of February, 2009, GateHouse changed directions with their internet strategy and The Batavian became available to us if we wanted it.

As transplants from California, Billie and I found we really loved Western New York and didn't want to leave, and I also firmly believed in The Batavian and the need to prove that there was an audience in a typical American community for local online news and advertising.

The Batavian is now one of the leading online-only news sites in the country -- the subject of books, national media columns and news coverage and closely watched by those in the news industry who fret over the future of local journalism.

But most importantly is how Billie and I have been welcomed and embraced by the Genesee County community.  We're so grateful for the support of local residents and local businesses.  We've made so many good friends and received so much appreciation for what we do with The Batavian that we sometimes feel amazed by the support.

Thank you to all of you for five great years. We look forward to covering the news of Genesee County and doing all we can to promote local businesses for years to come.

I'm flying to California this morning. I'll be spending time with family. I'll be attending my mother's funeral on Saturday.

We've made all of the usual provisions for continuing coverage while I'm away. Billie will still be here and on the scanner as usual. Alecia Kaus will help with breaking news and our news partner WBTA will help with coverage.

Good luck to all of our local athletes in sectional play this weekend. I regret that I'll miss the basketball games I would have covered, but Nick Sabato will be covering games.

I'll be out of town for a couple of days to attend to a family matter.

There will still, however, be coverage of news in Genesee County while I'm gone. Billie remains in town. Alecia Kaus is helping out, as usual. We can pick up stories as needed from WBTA. I will, of course, have my laptop with me.

In 2013, The Batavian was visited 5,909,231 times and we served 9,794,627 page views. That's up from 2012 when there were 3.8 million visits and 5.4 million page views.

Here are the most viewed stories for 2013:

• Le Roy Legion hosting event to honor WWII vets
• Police looking for public's help in finding boy allegedly slammed to floor of Walmart by adult male
• Young man from Bergen killed in motorcycle accident in Le Roy, passenger seriously injured
• Oakfield teen's first deer bow hunting is an albino
• Armed robbery at Tops in Le Roy, by Billie Owens
• An evening with Phil Robertson: a glimpse into the life of the Duck Dynasty patriarch, by Jim Nigro
• Molasses Hill closed, seized by state
• Mother seeks help in finding her missing son
• 'Everybody was lucky' that nobody was seriously hurt when SUV slams into house on Akron Road
• Town of Le Roy supervisor arrested following alleged incident with neighbor

It's been four months since I posted the monthly top 10 most viewed stories, so below are the top posts for December, November, October and September.

December:

• Fatal accident on Route 63 near Shepard Road
• Missing Darien man found dead in woods near home
• Local woman accused of falsely reporting robbery at gentlemen's club in Florida
• Information sought on Basom woman missing since Monday morning
• Individuals who buy MVP health plans through new exchange reportedly not covered in Genesee County
• Vehicle rolls over into water, passenger trapped, on Route 63 just south of Orleans County, by Billie Owens
• Services set for Stafford resident who died following accident on Route 63
• Dashawn Butler released from jail
• More than 2,100 residents east of Batavia without power
• Law and Order: Man accused of hitting refrigerator

November:

• Oakfield teen's first deer bow hunting is an albino
• Major fire causes severe damage to one of Genesee County's largest ag businesses
• Tot found wandering along Main Street allegedly without supervision, by Billie Owens
• Person trying to fell a tree using a tow rope and pickup on Pringle Avenue, by Billie Owens
• Hunter needs to be rescued from Iroquois wildlife refuge swamp, by Billie Owens
• BREAKING: Arrest made in recent robberies
• Man who admitted to multiple burglaries in 2008 given chance to avoid prison term
• Active shooter reported on Bloomingdale Road
• Suspect says 'out of control' addiction to crack cocaine led to robberies
• Male claims he was chased down Jackson Street by trio, by Billie Owens

October:

• Armed robbery at Tops in Le Roy, by Billie Owens
• Multiple reports of gunshots in the area of Jackson and Central
• 'Everybody was lucky' that nobody was seriously hurt when SUV slams into house on Akron Road
• Winning drug-free posters from local students
• Man who was listed as a director at GCASA accused of driving while impaired by drugs
• Local tattoo artist opens own shop on West Main Street, Batavia
• Dog chases child, dad shows up with long gun threatening to shoot dog and owner, by Billie Owens
• Three Rochester men accused of brazen attempt to steal $1,900 in merchandise from Walmart
• Police announce arrest of suspect in alleged robbery of 7-11 in Batavia
• Young black, male Labrador retriever, 'extremely well behaved', found on Marsh Road, by Billie Owens

September

• Man seriously injured in altercation unconscious at State Street and Hutchins Place, by Billie Owens
• Big brawl in vicinity of State Street and Lewis Place, by Billie Owens
• Jason Jewett remembered with love, honor and respect
• Local businessman killed in skid loader accident at his home in Corfu
• Jason Jewett's love of cars honored by car club attending calling hours at Gilmartin
• Corfu girl flown to Strong following two-vehicle accident in Oakfield
• White, blond woman wearing blue sparkly shirt sought by the law for possible Walmart larceny, by Billie Owens
• A forgotten wallet helps police locate suspected copper thief
• Darien man accused of making sexual advance to teenage boy in Le Roy
• Smell of natural gas at Byron-Bergen Central School, students evacuated, by Billie Owens

We just learned that our series on Genesee County Farms and Farmers is receiving an online feature writing award from the New York State Agriculture Society.

We entered the first installments from the series earlier this year.

The award will be presented at the Society's annual forum in Liverpool on Jan. 9.

Tom Rivers, former staff writer for the Batavia Daily News and editor now of Orleans Hub, has previously been honored by the society for his stories on local agriculture.

It's a rather unexpected trip, but Billie and I are boarding a plane in the morning bound for California.

We will return Tuesday, Dec. 17.

As is typical when we travel, I'll have my computer and stay connected to The Batavian and will have some news to post.

Alecia Kaus, Bonnie Marrocco and Nick Sabato will also be contributing stories. Alecia will be monitor the scanner for us.

A server glitch caused us to lose anything and everything posted to the site since 6:05 p.m. -- your comments, my stories, any classified ads posted. I'll endeavor to rewrite the stories -- instead of getting a little more sleep before we head to the Buffalo airport. You'll need to repost anything you still want posted to the site.

More than 150 people have already downloaded our new iPhone app.

Today, a problem that was preventing news alert notifications from going out was fixed, so now those users will actually get the alerts we send out.

To download the iPhone version, click here.

To download the Droid version, click here.

If you have an iPhone, you can now download The Batavian's mobile app from the app store. Click here for a link to the app. 

It's a very simple app: It's a feed of what is posted to the home page and we will send alerts of select stories we post to the home page. The cost is $1.99. At best, with fee, we hope to offset our costs in providing the app.

For the Droid version, click here.

When I was in Chicago, the folks at Zebrareach showed me their new online ordering system for restaurants. I thought it was great, so a little less than a month later, we're launching BataviaEats.com.

Right now, we have 10 local restaurants participating. We've completed menus for five of them, with the rest scheduled to be finished before the end of the week. There are also four or five other restaurants I believe will sign up, and there are several restaurant owners I haven't talked with yet. So I'm sure we will be adding several more locally owned restaurants to BataviaEats.com.

BataviaEats.com will become your local online portal for ordering from great local restaurants (one of the blessings of Genesee County is our restaurants).

Here are the menus available now:

• Big Pauly's
• Clor's
• Larry's Steakhouse
• Settler's Family Restaurant
• T.F. Brown's

Coming within days will be City Slickers, D&R Depot, Sammy Hill's and Sweet Ecstasy Bakery.

Also, Big Pauly's and T.F. Brown's have also added their online ordering menu to their Web sites, and the other restaurants with Web sites will also, I'm sure, add their menus.

Restaurant owners: Want to sign up? Contact me at howard@thebatavian.com or (585) 250-4118. There's no set-up cost, no monthly fee, just a small transaction fee plus the standard credit card fees. You just need a way to receive orders -- fax, e-mail or through a Web browser.

Here's a bit of a surprise -- The Batavian's new mobile app, released earlier this week, is ranked #25 in Top Paid News and Magazine Apps. It's the only local news app in the top 25. The overall national ranking is #151. The average rating is 4.2. 

If you have a Droid smartphone, click here to download it.

If you've downloaded it, please rate it.

If you're a Android smartphone owner, download The Batavian's new breaking news app from Google Play.

In the first two days since we released it, there have been 30 downloads, which I think is pretty darn good.

We've submitted the app to Apple for inclusion in the iTunes store. It could take two or three weeks for the app to be approved (knock on wood that it will be).

It's a very simple app. Right now, it's just a feed of what appears on our home page and the ability for us to send you push notifications.

And that's really the point of the app: Push notifications, or alerts. If you download the app, we will use push notifications to alert you to breaking news, important news, features and important sports stories. We won't do it for every minor scanner call and routine press releases. Some stories will be a judgment call, but the idea will be to alert you to things posted that we want to draw your attention to and hope you'll want to be sure and know about right away.

A long time ago a reader said to me, "I wish I could get a notification on my phone when you post a new story," and I thought that was a good idea.

After some research, I decided creating an app would be the best course of action, but how to get it done? I had a hard time finding an affordable programmer I could trust and none of the DIY tools seemed satisfactory.

A few days ago, I found a tool I wanted to try and after some futzing about, I uploaded our first app to Google Play (so the app right now is only available for Droid -- it's coming for iPhone, but it's a little harder to get into the Apple Store and that process could take two or three weeks).

It's a very simple app. Right now, it's just a feed of what appears on our home page and the ability for us to send you push notifications.

And that's really the point of the app: Push notifications, or alerts. If you download the app, we will use push notifications to alert you to breaking news, important news, features and important sports stories. We won't do every minor scanner call and routine press releases. Some stories will be a judgment call, but the idea will be to alert you to things posted that we want to draw your attention to and hope you'll want to be sure and know about right away.

Getting the app to this stage has cost us $150 and with hosting fees, there will be recurring costs, so we've set a one-time fee on the app of $1.49.

Here's the link to Google Play to download it. Or search Google Play for "The Batavian."

For the second time in three years, The Batavian has won a General Excellence in Digital Journalism Award from the Inland Press Association.

This time, The Batavian comes in second in the under 50,000 circulation category (we're placed in that category based on our area's population size) behind The Santa Fe New Mexican.

Three years ago, The Batavian received a third-place award.

The judges wrote:

The Batavian is what good digital news sites should aspire to be. It features excellent journalism, creative interactivity and is clearly ingrained in its community. Readers feel they know what it's like living in Batavia from reading this site.

The awards will be presented later this month at Inland's 128th annual meeting later this month in Chicago. The Batavian, unfortunately, won't be attending.

There are more than 1,200 print newspaper members of Inland and The Batavian is just one of only a few online-only publications that have joined.

Today starts a round of travel for me. I'm heading off to Syracuse this morning where I'll visit the S.I. Newhouse School of Communication at Syracuse University. I'm looking forward to meeting with a group of students in a news start-up class. I'll also get to see some of the forward-thinking projects news business students are working on. It's been about six years since I visited the school, so I'm looking forward to dropping in again.

Tomorrow, I'm flying to Chicago. Each of the past three Octobers I've gone to Chicago for what was known as the Block-by-Block conference. It was sponsored by academic foundations interested in promoting local online news. That funding was of a limited duration, but what BxB spawned was the formation of an association known as Local Independent Online News Publishers (LION for short). I'm a board member. We have more than 100 members. We've managed to pull off organizing our own first-ever LION conference. So I'll be at that.

I don't return until Saturday night. I'll miss the Wine Walk. The Batavian is participating in the Wine Walk. Lisa Ace and Dee Neilans, as last year (and as Dee has done for us the past three years), are going to be pouring wine at our location in the foyer of the Masonic Temple building. I just won't be there.

Coverage, of course, during the next few days, will be limited, but not missing. Billie will still be here posting items as they come along. I'll also be able to do what I can do from a distance and within my time constraints.

Press release:

GO ART! presents its 13th annual Genesee-Orleans Community Arts Awards Gala Dinner & Auction at 6 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 26 at Terry Hills Golf Course and Banquet Facility, 5122 Clinton Street Road (Route 33), Batavia. Each year, GO ART! recognizes the extraordinary contributions in art and culture made by individuals and organizations in the Genesee-Orleans region at this unique event. This year’s honorees are:

Community Arts Awards:

• Business -- Laura Gardner, “a lily & a sparrow” in Medina
• Business -- Howard Owens, The Batavian
• Cultural Organization -- Barb Toal & Friends of Batavia Peace Garden
• Artist -- “The Humans” – John Dumrese, Richard Doolan, Gar Trusselle, William Kuhns, Martin Busch and the late Danny Long
• Artist -- Carol “Kay” McMahon, musician from Genesee County

GO ART! Board of Directors Special Recognition: Mary Pat Hancock, chair of the Genesee County Legislature

Linda L. Blanchet Award: To be announced

Tickets are $27/non-members, $25/members, and advance reservations are required. Enjoy a delectable dinner and desserts while local band “The Old Hippies” featuring Bill McDonald provides musical entertainment. Dress is business casual.

A silent auction featuring quality work by local artists, artisans and cultural organizations will be held throughout the evening, and the annual Gala Raffle will be held as well. The Grand Prize this year is 14K white gold pendant necklace with black and white diamonds .50ptw, compliments of Valle Jewelers; Value $1,250.

The Raffle tickets have a requested donation of $5 each or five for $20, and are available at GO ART! and at the event. Winners will be selected in a random drawing at the GO ART! Gala on Oct. 26; you do not need to be present to win.

For more information, call 585.343.9313, e-mail info@GOart.org, or visit www.GOart.org.

Believe it or not, I just finished processing the new members for August -- including those who signed up at Summer in the City (that's how busy I've been the past two or three weeks). With everybody entered into the member database, we're at 198 members.

There's no door prize for being the 200th member, but sign up now and your membership card just might read member #200. 

It's a good time to sign up because we will be sending out membership cards and packages of gift certificates Wednesday or Thursday (except to those who already received gift certificates at Summer in the City, who will just get their cards).

A membership in The Batavian Club helps support and sustain The Batavian. Think of it as a subscription, but instead of getting a paper on your doorstep, you get an envelope mailed to you filled with more than $325 in gift certificates to local businesses.

We appreciate you reading The Batavian every day, but in order for us to grow and improve what do, even just to sustain the business, we need your support. 

To be clear about why we're doing The Batavian Club -- this isn't about selling discounts to businesses, though we do that, it's about reaching out to the people who read The Batavian every day and appreciate what we do, to make a small contribution to help us build a sustainable business. Advertising alone is not enough. We need reader support. Think of this as a voluntary subscription for all the great news you get online from The Batavian.

So, please use the options below and join today.

TO JOIN: Use PayPal buttons below, or to pay by check (annual only) or credit card, click here to download form. Or call (585) 250-4118 to pay by credit card.

We've set up four membership tiers -- Subscribe to the club monthly as one person or as a household, or annually at either of those levels. 

Members receive a membership card, bumper sticker and a package of gift certificates to local businesses. 

It's important to note, this isn't a subscription to read the site. Our stories remain free to read. This is a voluntary subscription with benefits (and we'll add benefits as it grows).

Join via PayPal below, or for annual and one-time memberships paid by check, click here to download this form (monthly, recurring payment memberships must be via PayPal or credit card.) To pay by credit card, use the form, or call (585) 250-4118.

Monthly Single Membership - $5 per month
Includes membership card and bumper sticker, one package of gift certificates to local businesses.

Monthly Household Membership - $10 per month
Includes two membership cards and two bumper stickers, one package of gift certificates to local businesses.

Annual Single Membership - $50 per year
Includes membership card, bumper sticker, one package of gift certificates to local businesses.

Annual Household Membership - $100 per year
Includes two membership cards and two bumper stickers, one package of gift certificates to local businesses.

Annual membership, one payment of $60
Includes membership card, bumper sticker, one package of gift certificates to local businesses.

Annual household membership, one payment of $120
Includes two membership cards, bumper sticker, one package of gift certificates to local businesses.

Here are the most viewed posts for August, 2013:

• Young man from Bergen killed in motorcycle accident in Le Roy, passenger seriously injured
• Mother seeks help in finding her missing son
• Town of Le Roy supervisor arrested following alleged incident with neighbor
• Sunday night fight on Harvester Avenue left local man critically injured
• Car versus motorcycle accident, serious injuries, on North Road, Le Roy, by Billie Owens
• Derek Sheldon remembered with tears, laughter and duck calls
• County star Jason Aldean at Darien Lake means, of course, lots of arrests
• Thirty-six people arrested or issued citations at John Mayer concert at Darien Lake
• Woman 'covered in blood' walking dog on Route 19, Le Roy, by Billie Owens
• Suspected flirt charged with drunken driving

It was another record traffic month for The Batavian. We had 130,475 unique visitors, 551,570 visits and 931,241 page views.