A look at the story behind the New York Times Silicon Prairie story

A look at the story behind the New York Times Silicon Prairie story

Original post by DANNY SCHREIBER via Silicon Prairienews

Over the four years that I’ve written for Silicon Prairie News, I haven’t seen an article on Omaha, Des Moines and Kansas City’s startup scene receive as much buzz and attention as the recent New York Times story, “Tech Start-Ups Find a Home on the Prairie.” Tweet after tweet, Facebook like after Facebook like and email after email, readers shared the story far and wide.

On Nov. 21, the day The Times published the piece online, it made the site’s list of 10 most emailed stories for the day, according to the story’s author, John Eligon. A little more than two weeks after the article was published, it had tallied more than 325 shares on Twitter (a combination of orginal tweets and retweets). On Facebook, it had racked up more than 730 shares, 700 likes and 215 comments. VoterTide, a social media analytics startup based in Omaha, shared these statistics with SPN after I reached out to its co-founder for help with this post.

Ironically, it was an email sent from VoterTide in May that set in motion the events that would eventually put this story on the front page of the New York Times print edition on Thanksgiving day.

“A person from VoterTide … emailed me to tell me about their product and had mentioned in that email about the growing tech startup scene in the plains,” Eligon (left), a seven-year veteran of The Times, said in a phone interview Wednesday.

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