By Mike Weland
Editor
At 10:06 p.m. Thursday, someone clicked a button
on our
Facebook page, and established News Bonners
Ferry as the best liked local news source in Boundary
County. We can't be sure who our 5,000th
Facebook friend is, but we are glad you stopped
by.
It seems, in a world where most news sources are
suspect, that our simple notion, that the most
important news is local and that delivering it
in time to matter is essential, is a notion
appreciated.
I pray NewsBF never gets too big for its
britches.
You might not think it, with over 98-percent of
News Bonners Ferry readers being from the United
States, and most of them from a small circle
less than 100 miles in circumference centered on
Bonners Ferry, that there are people around the
world interested in the goings on of our
community.
Also on Thursday, six people from Canada (most
within that circle) visited the front page of
this simple website, the farthest of our good
neighbors to the north being from Nova Scotia. A
few of our regular readers are even Newfies.
Here's to you, eh?!
Readers from India, Gambia, Jamaica, Trinidad,
South Africa, Vietnam and Guatemala all dropped
in to visit yesterday to read about our
Distinguished Young Women and our mudslides.
Had you told us you'd stop in, I'd have put on a
fresh pot of coffee.
While we don't know who they are, NewsBF gets
almost weekly visits from readers many U.S.
states (all of them) and from foreign places
including Australia, Germany, India, Italy and
Ecuador ... we can only assume that these
readers are kids who grew up here and have moved
out into the big wide world to make their
contributions, or people from other nations who
once visited Boundary County ... exchange
students perhaps.
Maybe they have family here, or friends from the
old country, and they are just checking up.
Whatever the reason, it is nice that they are
thinking of us.
A bunch of our out-of-county visitors, we think,
might be people who live here, but go on
vacation and want to check up on how things are
at home while they're away. We've had messages
from Hawaii, the Ukraine and Belize telling us
that they are glad we're here.
In the last three months, readers from 67
nations around the globe have stopped in;
Nigeria, the Phillipines, Bangladesh, Mexico,
Spain, Belgium and Germany among them.
The list of the home countries of visitors who
have dropped by since this site was established
six years ago this month, according to
independent statistics, show that at one time or
another, a reader from all seven of the
continents on Earth, Antarctica included, has
looked in to see how Bonners Ferry is doing via
the website you are reading right now, and that
there has been at least one reader visiting from
nearly all of the 196 countries now existing.
The reason you visit matters not, we are glad
for for your company, and glad you think us a
help.
DISCLAIMER: NewsBF is an equal
opportunity news source, available for free to
readers in any nation around the world
regardless of race, color, religion, gender,
sexual orientation, gender identity or
expression, national origin, age, genetic
information, disability, or veteran status. If
other biases arise, we will ignore them, too.
Now that that's out of the way, we are grateful
to each of you who takes time to stop in for a
visit, and extend a welcome to each of you to
drop by any time. Let your friends know. Pets
are welcome, too. |