Maritime Matters to the US Pacific Northwest and other "NEWS"

I really enjoy gCaptain. In fact, I log in and read your stories just about every day that I have access to the internet. In addition to the great coverage of maritime news from the US and around the world, I find the forums to be a great place to get the inside scoop and exchange ideas.

That being said, I was disappointed to see the post ‘“Maritime Matters” to the US Pacific Northwest’ on your homepage. I live in NW Washington State, and work for a tugboat company that sometimes does business related to Vigor Industrial, and I can’t agree more that ‘Maritime’ does matter to the Pacific Northwest, and to my personal livelihood. I also understand the need to have sponsors and pay the bills to offer this great website to us free of charge.

But, lets be honest: that “story” has no business on the front page of this site with the other real news. Ads are ads and news is news. Your op-eds are intriguing and Maritime Monday is always entertaining, but this is crap. Not only is this story all fluff, you completely missed the real story from the newspapers today that Vigor has purchased ASD in Ketchikan, Alaska. I hope you did get paid for this story, or at least they buy ads in the future and help keep this site strong…but if you really want to be the “World Leader in Maritime & Offshore News” you might think about keeping the boundary between advertising and content clearly separated. This isn’t the first time a front-page article has blurred the line between ads and real content.

Keep up the good work, but try to keep the ads to banners and pop-ups.

Captfish,

gCaptain’s news section is typically custom content written by our staff, freelancers or media partners (e.g. Dow Jones). Most of the news provided by our competitors is edited press release like the article you are referring to. We do publish these releases on a daily basis but, as you suggested, we segregate it into a seperate section of our site titled Corporate News. Articles in this section are not visible on either our homepage or sent out via our newsletter but rather exists for people looking (mostly via google) for information about specific products or services.

The problem is that we use the same software for real news as we do for press releases and, sometimes, we forget to click on the button that keeps it off our homepage.

On occasion we do post press releases to the homepage and newsletter but only if they are either:
Deemed truly newsworthy by our editors
OR
It’s a message from an existing sponsor.

The bottom line is that we don’t sell placement on the homepage or newsletter unless the company has already bought - [I]clearly visible[/I] - banner ads (e.g. CAT or Military Sealift Command).

Make sense?

P.S. I’ve talked with Rob and we’ve moved the Vigor story to the Corporate News section.

-John

Captfish,

If you’ve got something to say, send us an email next time.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed this or not, but we work our ASS off every flippin’ day to get the news out and to make gCaptain the best source of info it can be to our industry. I’m sorry you didn’t like that article, but apparently you didn’t realize that “maritime matters” happens to be a MARAD initiative, and I just happened to stumble upon Vigor’s website that, in fairly well written terms, was able to relate his simplistic two-word slogan into something relevant.

Furthermore, if you think we missed the news about something, then do us a favor and give us a heads up instead of giving us a hard time about it.

Rob.

Mr. Almeida,

Please forgive me if the tone of my message was misunderstood. Perhaps calling the press release [I]crap[/I] was inappropriate, and for that I apologize.

With regard to your comment about if I notice how hard you work to make this site the best source of information…I prefaced my message with two paragraphs of sincere praise for gCaptain, and regularly enjoy your contributions to the site.

The purpose of my message was constructive criticism, not stone throwing. I posted it on the [B]forum[/B] because I thought that was the place for active discussion and [B]exchange of ideas[/B]. My participation in the forums is limited to the time I can spend in front of a computer, and I do try to contribute useful information to the community when I can, as evidenced by some of my previous posts.

Thanks for your hard work in making gCaptain a great site, but if the users can’t share criticisms in the forums, then I’ll just keep mine to myself.

I think the best topic to come out if this post was the comment: ‘Gcapt has no POP ups. And no spam.’

All the other hyperbole is informationally entertaining. Keep up the good work.

Captfish, don’t sweat it. Criticisms are always welcome, you just caught me at the wrong time. Sorry to rage on you:)