How a one-man news site beat the national media on a Trump shooting scoop

John Paul Vranesevich, the owner and only full-time reporter for the Beaver Countian, was reporting on a candlelight vigil for a slain transgender teen in Mercer County, Pa., last Saturday when his phone started pinging with text messages.

A lone gunman on a roof had just fired toward Donald Trump at a rally in nearby Butler County, leaving the former president injured, a local man dead and serious concerns about security surrounding the event. People in law enforcement whom Vranesevich had come to know from a dozen years covering this corner of western Pennsylvania wanted the journalist to know what was happening.

“I was literally in the corner, going back and forth with my sources, who were giving me the play-by-play,” he recalled this week.

And he quickly realized that they were sharing details with him that had not yet been reported by national media.

Vranesevich silenced his phone, telling his contacts he’d get back to them, and kept covering the vigil. But by Monday afternoon, his follow-up reporting culminated in a major scoop: Local officers had actually been stationed inside the building the shooter climbed to fire his shots. And another officer had alerted a command center about the suspicious man before he even climbed the roof.

The journalist said it did not surprise him, as the solo full-time employee of his small local news site, that he was able to break a major story about the U.S. Secret Service’s most dramatic failure in decades - a story that took hours and days for national press, including The Washington Post, to confirm.

“All news is local,” he said. “Everything that happens that the national [media] cares about is happening in some community, somewhere.”

Vranesevich developed relationships with law enforcement sources over years following the ins and outs of Beaver County, from unsolved murders to drama at the county commission.

He said that some of those long-standing sources contacted him after the rally shooting to share some of the details of what happened that day with him because they were concerned that the national narrative unfolding about the shooting was inaccurate or incomplete - that it would leave the public to believe that local law enforcement had failed to do their jobs and put the president at risk.

Sources like these may be hesitant speaking to national reporters, thinking “they’re going to come here, get their story, leave, and they don’t care about me or my community,” Vranesevich said. “What they know about me is I was here before the big story happened, and I’ll be here after the big story happened.”

As he was about to publish his story, though, Vranesevich said he tipped off contacts on CBS’s news desk. He knew his sources would want to get their story out to a national audience. CBS News published their story hours later, crediting the Beaver Countian’s original work.

Vranesevich started his news site in 2011. He took an unconventional path into journalism, though. As a college student, he started a hacker news site, AntiOnline. But as his focus shifted to computer security and anti-hacking measures, he found himself attracting the ire of hackers. Vranesevich sold off his company - he would not disclose the price, citing a nondisclosure agreement - and decided to get involved in the other side of journalism after his work got the attention of the New York Times, Vanity Fair and other national press. He started the Beaver Countian as “one-person guerrilla journalism venture.” He now has the help of four or five freelance editors and contributing reporters.

He has reported on stories that have gotten national attention, like the unsolved murder of a local teacher who had been one of his sources (CBS’s “48 Hours” hired him as a consultant for its own take on that story), but also topics of local interest, such as whether government officials are filing timely financial disclosures. He also publishes an automated log of all 911 calls in the county.

For all the friendly sources he has developed, Vranesevich has had more than a few clashes with local officials, too. He accused a sheriff of threatening him with a gun; the sheriff was acquitted in a jury trial but voted out of office. Another local official tried to get him to reveal the names of anonymous commenters via a subpoena as part of a defamation lawsuit, though Vranesevich himself was not sued.

Bill Vidonic, a former reporter at the Beaver County Times who now freelances for the Beaver Countian, said that Vranesevich is seen as somewhat of a “renegade,” who “doesn’t always have to play by the rules.”

Some of his stories carry a certain editorial flair that corporate newspapers might frown upon. (He slapped the headline “Nepotism gone wild!” on top of a story recounting accusations about a local judge’s hiring of a secretary.) He has also harshly criticized the Beaver County Times in past editorials. But Vidonic said Vranesevich sticks to core journalistic tenets of reporting and corroborating facts before he publishes.

“He’s been an outlier in terms of media, and I think that’s where his strength has been,” Vidonic said. “A lot of people reach out to him because they don’t think he’s part of the establishment. He’s one of them.”

Vidonic sees a need for journalists like Vranesevich. As traditional sources of news have dried up in places like Beaver County, local news groups on Facebook have proliferated but can end up promoting misinformation. (Vranesevich erected an unusually tough paywall on his news site, which relies entirely on subscriptions, in part to dissuade readers from cutting and pasting his stories onto social media. He declined to disclose how many subscribers he has.)

While Pittsburgh-based media sometimes cover Beaver County - NBC affiliate WPXI ran some major scoops about security at the Trump rally, including that the officer who first spotted the gunman had called the command center a full 26 minutes before the shooting - the Beaver County Times is the only daily newspaper dedicated to the county.

Vidonic estimates that when he joined the Beaver County Times in 1994, it had around 50 staffers in the newsroom. But its staff has dwindled over the years, in a reflection of national trends of a decline in advertising, changes in reading habits and corporate consolidation. Now, the paper has five - three reporters and two editors, one of whom also edits a nearby paper - plus dispatches from the USA Today state capital bureau chief. They’re hiring a fourth reporter.

“Local newspapers just don’t have the resources to cover what they should be covering,” Vidonic said.

The Times, owned by USA Today owner Gannett, also broke stories about the rally tragedy, including interviews with a witness to the shooting and a local GOP official who tried to help resuscitate Corey Comperatore, the local fireman who was killed. A spokeswoman for Gannett also pointed out that USA Today was the first to publish the name of the alleged shooter, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks.

“The Beaver County Times has deep roots in Aliquippa and throughout the western Pennsylvania region,” Patrick O’Shea, editor of the Beaver County Times and Ellwood City Ledger, said in a statement, “and we remain firmly committed to serving our readers and advertisers with trusted, reliable local news, while relying on the strength of the USA Today Network to ensure up-to-the-minute national coverage.”

Vranesevich said he remains in constant communication with his sources on the rally shooting and expects he will publish more stories about it. Meanwhile, he is also writing about the county’s top public defender and gathering more reporting on the slain Mercer County teen. All along, he takes stock of his own limited resources to tackle the big stories when compared to regional or national press.

“If I think someone else is going to tell that story, I don’t worry about it,” he said. “Being hyperlocal, I can’t compete with that. I concentrate on what’s not being told.”