“And that, gentlemen, is how we do that.”

That Jim Lovell quote has always been one of my favorites.

Yes, I knew about “Brewed Awakening” on last Tuesday. That’s the new coffee shop business that won the Danville Economic Development’s contest for free and reduced rent at 610 Craghead Street. No, I didn’t blow open the news as soon as I found it out just to make it known that I was able to get the story before anybody else.

Let’s talk about why in this InsideCentral article…

Here’s the press release that the city sent out today.

This contest winner had already been decided more than three weeks ago. A good friend of SouthsideCentral wanted me to find out who the winner was, so I started working on it for them. I was able to work my sources and come up with all the information. I was at the 100% confidence level, so I could have published the story then and beat all other media sources to the news.

I chose not to do that because this was a fun little contest that Economic Development had run and I didn’t want to destroy their announcement. This was also a big deal with the owners of the new business and I just didn’t want to publicly ruin their fun little surprise. I told the economic development staff that I would defer publishing the information, but I wasn’t going to wait forever. I asked them to put their press release together and publish it first. I reminded the staff about that at Monday’s RIFA meeting and they said they’d get it done on Tuesday. They did, and all is good in the world. I did tell a few SouthsideCentral friends the “inside information” because they had asked about some rumors they had heard. That’s a big difference from revealing a fun little contest winner to everybody and ruining the relatively small surprise.

It’s a judgment call. When it came to the Walmart Neighborhood Market plans, SouthsideCentral announced that two weeks before any other media source picked the news up. I did background research that the other media sources weren’t able (or willing) to do, confirmed it to the 100% confidence level, then published it. I did the same thing last week on Walmart’s plans to demolish the existing Piggly Wiggly store and rebuild from scratch.

My favorite quote from that story on social media was…

And my response was…

Needless to say, SouthsideCentral was 100% correct.

I didn’t write this article to blow my own horn. I wrote this article to let you know what goes on behind the scenes of SouthsideCentral on a daily basis. I want you to know that you can count on SouthsideCentral to have accurate information. Sure, I’m going to make a few mistakes along the way. But I promise they’re going to be very rare and that I will correct them as soon as possible.

Like the article title says … “And that, gentlemen, is how we do that.”

BonusCentral: Here’s the artist’s rendition of what Brewed Awakening’s sign will look like…