No I.D., No Comment

Hello, I appreciate your concern about the traffic to our website your deft attempts to make me look naïve. But allow me a minute to clear up some just plain mistruths. I, Scott Lewis, am the CEO of voiceofsandiego.org, not the editor. That designation belongs to my longtime friend and associate Andrew Donohue, who runs one of the most productive and inspired teams of reporters I've ever known. You say our traffic went down according to quantcast.com. May I direct you to that measurement source again (http://www.quantcast.com/voiceofsandiego.org). Not sure what you were looking at but you completely misread it. You say our traffic has "taken a free-fall to 20,000–25,000 per month." There's nothing on the quantcast graph that comes close to those numbers. And as you can see, we're right back where we were before the website redesign (and its new comment policy) at more than 94,000 people per month. You write that I seemed unconcerned. That's because I'm not concerned. I hate even talking about those numbers because we measure our success based on our impact, our loyal readership and our number of members, which are all growing well. But nonetheless, I figured that if you're going to play the part of a media columnist, and use these graphs to make your point, you might want to read them accurately. Furthermore if you want to use that measurement, I wonder why you don't highlight sandiegoreader.com's estimated numbers on Quantcast (http://www.quantcast.com/sandiegoreader.com), which show it at well below half our readership. I don't think that means anything about attendance at your own "congress" or whether you've gone "soft" but "some have speculated..." Which brings up the last point: You say "some have speculated" that Jim Madaffer provided the tip on the SEDC investigation. That's hilarious, if only because the man wouldn't even speak to us after we called for his resignation in 2006. We followed the SEDC story through for two and a half years of hard-nosed investigative reporting. While we certainly miss Will Carless as a person and an incredibly talented journalist, he wasn't the first, last or only investigative reporter on our staff. We've replaced him and even grown our reporting staff since he left six months ago. In fact, we're in the process of finishing up what will be our third multi-part special report in the last two months. Thanks for calling, at least. Had I known you wanted to write about more than just our traffic numbers, I'd have loved the chance, as would Donohue, to have offered up perspective on it. Sorry you didn't give us the opportunity. Sincerely, Scott Lewis CEO, voiceofsandiego.org
— January 14, 2010 4:20 p.m.