Let’s go back in our time machine. The year was 1995. Asbury Park Press owner Jules Plangere III had discovered the internet and realized the future of media’s long-term success was online. He invested tens of millions of dollars into building a new company to launch the Asbury Park Press’s digital future. He called it “IN Jersey.”
One of the young tech professionals Plangere hired to move the company forward was Phil Stilton, editor and owner of Shore News Network. The entire IN Jersey team came together and forged ahead, creating New Jersey’s first online news website, app.com, and IN Jersey — the state’s first statewide local dial-up internet service to compete with AOL and others.
Sidenote: Stilton was the actual domain owner and holder for the original AsburyParkPress.com domain years, which he eventually voluntarily surrendered shortly after leaving the company.
The Asbury Park Press hired Stilton, who had just finished his enlistment in the United States Marine Corps in a communications MOS, and was a technology prodigy going back to his teenage years. He knew all there was to know about the internet, TCP-protocols, Ethernet protocols, programming, computer hardware, software, and yes, even the media. There was nothing he couldn’t take apart, put back together, or figure out how to.
As a high school student at Toms River North, Stilton published his own statewide music magazine called “Jersey Scene” and wrote as a freelancer for other ‘zines’ in the state and even national publications. While music was his passion, his love was always with technology, tech gadgets, and electronics. He had to know everything there was to know about every digital device and new technology as the internet rose to prominence. He was exploring the inner workings of the internet years before there were even web browsers and commercial applications for the new “World Wide Web.”
Collectively, the young whipper-snappers at IN Jersey forced New Jersey’s entire media industry into the digital age, and the dinosaurs were starting to get worried.
At the Asbury Park Press, Stilton helped the team that built America’s first-ever hyperlocal news platform. The team at IN Jersey was, in the words of its leader at the time, Diane Burley, internet pioneers. They built online entertainment platforms and information gateways to the growing internet user base across New Jersey.
Stilton even developed the state’s first online radio broadcast system for New Jersey 101.5 (with Daryl and Cliff, of course) then owned by the Asbury Park Press, along with others in the IT department at the paper. Back then nobody broadcast radio over the internet in New Jersey.
It was a crude system at first. The team had a radio receiver receiving the broadcast via the airwaves, then converted that signal to a digital one, before streaming it to a public Real Audio server where hundreds of people listened to the radio station on their computer for the first time. They later improved that system by piping in the feed directly from the Trenton radio farmhouse via a T-1 line to Neptune, then into a dedicated hosting facility at one of IN Jersey’s point-of-presence locations, where they also hosted the New Jersey Devils’ original website.
Technology was booming at the Asbury Park Press and money was being heavily invested into the company’s future as an internet leader.
But the old men in the boardroom and newsroom, including editorial writer Randy Bergmann, didn’t like this new-fangled sorcery and witchcraft that threatened their way of life. They generally treated Ms. Burley poorly, even intentionally inviting her to their board meetings filled with cigarette and cigar smoke when she was an expecting young mother.
Bergmann was one of those people who wanted this internet nonsense out of the newsroom. He was a newspaperman’s newspaperman.
The mere presence of the IN Jersey team angered the men who once controlled the media and direction of the Asbury Park Press, including Bergmann. Like many of his peers, he felt threatened by the idea that these inexperienced tech innovators — with no formal newspaper or media background — were now driving their century-old paper into the future.
The newsroom resisted online news at every opportunity. They hated the IN Jersey team. They despised them. They wanted them gone.
And in 1998, their wish came true. The Plangeres sold the Asbury Park Press to Gannett. CEO Robert Collins told the team, “The internet is a fad,” and said they should start looking for other jobs because this was a newspaper that needed to run on a 3% print profit margin.
And just like that, one of the state’s most advanced newspapers in the digital era descended back into the dark ages. The IN Jersey team went on to successful careers. Stilton went on to become the Regional IT Director for a global online media and services firm before starting his own tech and media consulting business in Toms River in 2003.
That eventually grew into his current enterprise, which includes Shore News Network.
Shore News Network now reaches more than 10 million readers per month and stands as a major media success story. Randy Bergmann, meanwhile, was eventually laid off in one of Gannett’s many rounds of downsizing since the takeover three decades ago. The Asbury Park Press is now a distant memory of what it once was.
The success of Shore News Network was simple. Stilton used the playbook Gannett abandoned back in 1998 and created a hyperlocal news platform online. In fact, it was so easy that a caveman could have done it at the time. The IN Jersey team could never understand why the Asbury Park Press didn’t stick with it.
These days, Bergmann is a Facebook blogger with an audience of about 200 people — most of them former Asbury Park Press reporters who were also laid off by Gannett.
Randy Bergmann is a grumpy, miserable, over-opinionated, out-of-work editorial writer — and it eats at him to know that one of those dot-com kids outpaced him in life. He’ll always be a bitter old man.
He spends many of his days plotting ways to smear Shore News Network. In fact, the outlet comprises about 20% of his current online editorials. While it may be flattering, it is also remarkable that a man in his seventies spends his remaining days trying to claim a victory against the dot-com-boomer who altered his career path back in 1998. If only Bergmann had gotten on board, he too could have been more successful in life.
Like every piece ever written by Bergmann, this too is just one person’s opinion. That opinion is simple. Randy Bergmann is an angry old man with Trump Derangement Syndrome who has seen life pass him by while he sat atop his once ivory tower. Now, he’s just a disgruntled Facebook blogger spewing his ridiculousness to an ever-shrinking audience.
For the record, nobody at Shore News Network reads his long-winded Facebook posts.