Rapid City SD – The day I accepted his friend request, he told me he was going to get thousands of eyes on my paper. Turns out that might be the only honest thing he ever said to me.

The first wave was exciting. That’s the honest truth of it. Numbers climbing, an unfamiliar spike showing up on the dashboard, the kind of morning that makes you think maybe this is finally catching on the way you’d hoped.

The Rapid City Sentinel runs on a 30-day rolling window for its analytics—a big day fades out gradually as it ages past the month mark—so even the inevitable roll-off felt manageable at first. I understood the mechanic. I could watch it climb and not panic.

That lasted about two days.

A four-digit day showed up almost immediately, and I knew I was screwed. Not because the number was bad, but because I knew exactly where it came from, and I knew it wasn’t honest. It was traffic bought with someone else’s chaos, not traffic earned by the reporting.

The Fumble in Pierre

Then came the stunt with the state’s Government Operations and Audit Committee (GOAC). He told me one of my articles was going in as Exhibit A—that it would make massive waves in Pierre. When someone tells you your article is going into a filing before a state legislative committee, you believe them. Why wouldn’t you?

But when the committee asked him for his evidence, he told them to read my paper. He didn’t even get the name right.

That’s the exact moment it actually landed for me. He wasn’t citing a source. He was standing in front of a state committee, asked to back up what he was claiming, and instead of producing his own evidence, he pointed at mine.

I wasn’t in that room. I never agreed to be his evidence. He spent something that wasn’t his to spend, and got the name of the publication wrong while he did it.

It was only later that I learned what he’d actually filed at GOAC. It wasn’t my article. It was two cover photos, stripped from two separate stories, with no text and no byline. Not Exhibit A. Not anything close to what he’d promised.

Honestly? I’m relieved it went that way. His sheer incompetence was a shield. If I had believed he’d genuinely promoted this paper in good faith, I might have felt some misplaced obligation to return the favor. That would have destroyed this paper’s credibility entirely.

Checking the Tape

The day after his Pierre performance, he messaged me and demanded I publish his manifesto: a notice he’d presented to the Pennington County State’s Attorney.

Then I read what he’d actually written, and I knew on the first pass it was garbage.

A quote he attributed to the City Council President didn’t match my own notes from that exact same meeting—notes I’d meticulously taken for an entirely different story. Independent journalism has a hard, unyielding rule: you check the tape. I told him flat-out I was having a hard time proofing it against reality.

Around that same week, my host flagged that I might have been hit with a security exploit making the rounds on WordPress sites. I mentioned the headache to him. His response? “Well, good luck with that.”

There were a few more exchanges after that. Then I went from restricting him to blocking him outright.

The Math Catching Up

Here’s the part most readers won’t know to ask about: because the analytics counter runs on that rolling 30-day window, the dishonest spike didn’t fade out the second I hit the block button. It rode along in the count for a full thirty days like a parasite, and then it dropped out all at once.

That is why the number looked like it cratered overnight. It wasn’t a mass exodus of real readers; it was just math finally catching up to a bullet I’d already dodged weeks earlier.

The whole time, sitting on top of a number that big, I felt like a fraud. Not because I’d done anything dishonest—I hadn’t. I held the line. But because the number wasn’t telling the truth about what this paper actually is.

City Hall knows who I am. They’re just not going to say so publicly, and I’ve come around to thinking that’s the better arrangement. The kind of leverage that comes with a viral spotlight is borrowed, and it always has to be paid back somehow. That’s the entire lesson of the last few weeks.

The kind of leverage I actually have doesn’t work that way. It doesn’t rely on online mobs or AI-generated legal threats. It just sits in the public record, plodding along and published, moving things whether or not anyone ever puts my name on it. And that’s really just fine with me.

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