Bill Bowman, Franklin Reporter & Advocate publisher and editor.

Welcome to the Franklin Reporter & Advocate, your online news source for Franklin Township.

I’m Bill Bowman, the Franklin Reporter publisher and editor and a township resident for more than 25 years. My first instinct was to write “inaugural edition,” because that’s what this would be had this been a “traditional” paper publication. But times have changed since I started in this business 30 years ago, and we have to change with them or get left behind.

But even though the method of delivery has changed — we’ve substituted pixels for paper — what is being delivered is the same as it always has been for the best weekly and daily newspapers: News about your community. (I should say “our community,” because I live here, too, and have for more than two decades.)

Within this site, you’ll find up-to-the-minute news about what matters most to us as Franklin residents. And that’s not just stories about how our tax money is being spent, although there will be plenty of those. In fact, we have a special section called “Your Taxes At Work.” There will also be stories about what’s going on inside our schools — public and private — how our town sports and recreation teams are doing, and what’s going on socially within Franklin. We’ll also keep you informed about crime in the township, as well as what developers are planning for our open spaces.

In short, as my first editor liked to say, we’ll be covering the town like a blanket.

This won’t be a one-way street, either. I encourage you to send in suggestions of things you’d like to see covered.

There once was a notion that newspapers, in addition to providing a day-by-day chronicle of life within a specific area, also served as the public record, a place to where someone could turn in five, 10 or 50 years to find out what life was like at a certain time. Today’s corporate-owned media – beholden to investors rather than readers – has largely forgotten that compact, ignoring what they consider mundane topics in favor of chasing trends.

Well, I’m old-school when it comes to community journalism, and I believe that news organizations have an obligation to their readers first. That’s what I strive to do with the Franklin Reporter & Advocate, and I hope you’ll come along with me. It’s going to be fun.

Bill Bowman

Publisher/Editor.