For the past 12 years, the Scotts Bluff County Scanner has been a public service made possible by Hale Multimedia and volunteers through the official broadcast provider of all scanner feeds, Broadcastify.

I have personally been able to interact directly with Lindsay Blanton, the founder and CEO over the years and I can tell you that Broadcastify has been fantastic to work with. Not only do they provide the official broadcast licensing and broadcast infrastructure, but they also us access to and full use of all archived broadcasts. For those in marketing, you understand how powerful this is.

For instance, during a high traffic incident like a robot trying to enter a house with a possible hostage situation, the traffic on our scanner reaches a point where it is one of the most listened to scanner feeds in the entire country, at that time. Overall we HAVE reached #1 and most recently were #2 during the above referenced unfortunate incident.

Furthermore, there is an increased interest in the timeliness and honesty at which we put out when we report on something in the community. Along with this increased readership and listenership, we also have volunteer staff that are interested in pursuing the news business on a commercial basis.

At Hale Multimedia we have been producing news and selling sponsorships along with other multimedia products for over 22 years. We know adversity and we are still here.

When we launched the scanner feed and facebook page back in 2009, we committed to keeping it going, despite our former rogue partner deleting our page at 7900 followers causing us to start over at 0 in August, 2019. So be it, after just 2 years now, we are back up to our previous followership.

It's fun to hear the other local news reports when they reference scanner traffic. The likelihood that every news person has an expensive ($300-$600+) physical scanner is low. We venture to say that MOST of the official news reporters in the area probably get that scanner traffic through one of the dozens of apps that use our feed. Our feed supplies all those apps. If our feed is down, no one other than those who own a physical scanner, can hear anything.

This would be a good time to ask for donations to help keep the scanner going as a free service to the community, but I won't. I'll just leave the link here.

More good news; Scotts Bluff County Scanner is expanding! With this official transformation to a paid news agency we will be putting together a team consisting of local reporters and sales personnel. Andi has agreed to be our Publisher and I (Brian) will serve as Editor and Sales Manager/Trainer while longtime scanner admin JoAnn Paramo will serve as our Breaking News Editor. Other personnel announcements will be made soon. If you are interested in becoming a reporter or sales representative for County Scanner News, please contact Brian or JoAnn.