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February 28, 2007
Editorial
Remember When Spam Was (Sort Of) A Food?
In the 21st century, the news business has become reliant on technology, particularly the internet.
Stacks of mail have been replaced by computer screens filled with e-mail.
However, one annoyance has carried over from one medium to the other:
Junk mail.
The postman’s bag used to be jammed full of ads and circulars and come-ons that businesses had to wade through in search of the more meaningful correspondence.
Like bills.
Today, much of our in-office communication is done by e-mail.
Unfortunately, the amount of junk mail clogging our internet arteries is even more voluminous than when we had to drag it in from the post office.
That junk mail is referred to as “Spam,” a term first coined back in the early internet days of 1993.
Prior to that, “Spam” was an alleged food product sold in square cans and usually consumed when nothing else remained in the cupboard.
While the myths surrounding how internet junk mail became named for the Hormel product are many and varied, the truth remains that when people hear the word “Spam” today, their first thought is usually of the vile e-mail advertisements which fill computer “Inboxes.”
While we are a small newspaper in a small community, we are not impervious to the ravages of international internet junk mail.
Since taking over the Lincoln County Record, the volume of spam has been as high as 2,000 e-mails in a week, including everything from invitations to porn sites, discount deals on Viagra, (which would lead you to wonder if those two varieties of junk mail actually come from the same source), to pleas from third-world bureaucrats begging us to help them launder millions of dollars from their beleaguered countries.
Obviously we use Anti-Spam software to filter out most of the junk, but it’s still an eye-catching number.
Partly due to the spam and partly due to changes in the way we process your e-mails to us, we’ve been forced to abandon a couple of our old e-mail addresses, including the old Yahoo account and the LCTurboNet account.
In their place, we have instituted several new e-mail addresses.
While we’ve tried to notify everyone of the change, not everyone got the “memo,” which means that some of your e-mails and press releases to the Lincoln County Record have not reached us.
Therefore, we want to take this opportunity to share the correct e-mail addresses with you.
If you have an ad you would like to buy and place with us, send it to ads@lincolncountyrecord.com.
For press releases or a story you would like us to run, the address is stories@lincolncountyrecord.com.
The correct e-mail address for classified ads is classified@lincolncountyrecord.com.
For those governmental and official agencies which need to place legal notices, the new e-mail address is legals@lincolncountyrecord.com.
And of course, if all else fails, you can get to us at admin@lincolncountyrecord.com.
If you can’t remember all of these, you can get the information from our website at www.lincolncountyrecord.com.
We know this is an inconvenience, but it’s part of the growing pains for a newspaper that is expanding and heading into the next phase of growth for the community, and the next era in journalism.
Meanwhile, if all this techno-babble is just too frustrating, we still use a communications tool which was made popular in the 1900s called the “telephone.”
It’s even manned by an actual human being during normal business hours.
Our number is (775) 726-3333.
For those whose e-mails to us have not gotten through over the last few weeks, we apologize.
For those who are excited about the improved lines of communication, we thank you.
And for those who are busily adding these new addresses to their list of broadcast e-mails and automated junk-mail generators, we hope your refrigerator dies, all your food spoils, and you are left with nothing for sustenance but a can of Spam dated 1993.
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