We've run an ad a few times promoting this site, the headline of which reads, "Putting Suffolk before the world."

It was just something I stole from another newspaper out west and I never thought that much about it.

On Thursday, at the State of the City event at the Hilton Garden Inn and Suffolk Conference Center, I had the good fortune of sitting next to Dr. Mark Dembert, director of the Western Tidewater Health District, better known as "The Health Department." Dembert's been on the job for about a year and is a fascinating person. He regaled us with stories during the duller moments of the event.

The doctor said he had been called that morning and interviewed for a story in some official publication of the Food and Drug Administration. They were doing a story about rabies and an official in Washington googled "Rabies cases" and up popped near the top of the search the rabies story from suffolknewsherald.com that had been reported a day earlier.

That made me feel pretty good about the work we are doing here. We live and work in Suffolk and care about it deeply. It's gratifying to know we attracted some attention to one of our own.

Our Webmaster, Mike Curbelo, was shocked when he came here last December and started playing around with our site. When you type in Suffolk on the major search engines, www.suffolknewsherald.com almost always comes near the top. That's positioning you normally have to pay for n and something advertisers should find valuable.

Dr. Dembert, incidentally, is an avid reader and I assumed from talking to him, is likely a good writer. We discussed the possibility of him writing a regular article about public health issues for the News-Herald. I think it would be a great addition to our product and look forward to seeing it start.