Tim Robison
Moapa Valley Progress
Starting this week, residents of the Moapa Valley can read the Moapa Valley Progress online. This week, the Progress posted its first online edition at www.ruralbusinessjournal.com/mvprogress. Readers of the Progress can now enjoy the same in-depth community news articles, coverage of local sports and lifestyle highlights as appear in the paper’s print edition; only now it is available online.
“We’re proud to finally be offering our content to the community online,” said Progress Publisher, John Z. Robison. “It has been a long time coming and we look forward to the ruralbusinessjournal.com/mvprogress website becoming an important resource to the community.”
John Robison established the Moapa Valley Progress in 1987. For twenty years, as the community has experienced rapid growth, John has seen the newspaper’s growth as well.
Being a native son of the Moapa Valley community, John had a true fondness for the community and its people. In his work at the Progress, he always held fast to the simple ideal that the local newspaper should be mainly about local people. “Throughout the past twenty years we have stayed focused on recording the beauties and accomplishments of this community,” John said. “Our readership has, of course, grown a lot since the paper opened. It will continue to grow. But now our website has the ability to highlight this wonderful community to a much larger audience.”
A little over three years ago, in November of 1995, John’s nephew, Vernon Robison, took over much of the day-to-day management of the newspaper’s operations as General Managing Editor. At that time, John and Vernon identified a long list of things that needed to be done to bring the newspaper into the 21st century. Many of those things have already been accomplished. But high on the list of priorities was to post local content on the internet. This project took longer than was expected, however. “I had hoped that we would have this website up and operational at least by the Progress’ 20th anniversary last August,” Vernon Robison said. “But delays in design and technical issues put the website’s unveiling off until now. I just wasn’t entirely happy with the site’s design and flow. So we, sort of, went back to the drawing board and got some help in making some improvements.”
Vernon is quick to point out that the paper’s website is still very much a work in progress. “We have started out very simple as anyone can see,” he said. “Frankly I’d like to keep it simple. But there are still a lot of bells and whistles that we have planned that aren’t there yet. We will be adding those one by one as time goes by.”
Presently, the site will remain merely an online version of the weekly publication. Vernon is quick to say that the electronic version will not replace the paper version of the Progress. “There is still a strong desire in our readership for the actual paper to continue to be distributed,” Robison said. “So we will continue to distribute it in the same way as we have for over twenty years.”
One difference in the web version of the Progress, however, is that important public notices of events that may occur in between the newspaper’s hardcopy distribution dates can now be posted on the paper’s website. “I hope that we can be a resource for disseminating that kind of timely or urgent information out to the community,” Vernon Robison said.
In the near future, Robison envisions a time when daily news updates will be added to the Progress website to make its coverage even more timely for its readers. “The possibilities for this site are truly tremendous,” Robison said. “We are very excited about it.”
As always, the Progress welcomes comments, input or feedback from its readership regarding the new website. Letters and comments can be sent to Robison at progress@mvdsl.com. Comments can also be phoned in to the Progress office at 397-6246.
