How John and I got to the Front Page of Yahoo!

As many of you know, last week John and I were featured in an article written by the Associated Press about NY’s population struggles.  We didn’t realize how large the story would be at the time, but here’s the background to how and why it all happened!

Soon after arriving in California, I was contacted by an AP Reporter asking if I was available to be interviewed.  He had found my blog (YAY!) and read my bio, seeing firsthand that we had traveled the country from Buffalo to San Diego – the perfect subjects for his article about people moving out of WNY. 

I was so excited that a reporter had found my blog and taken the time to read a bit about our story that I of course said yes to an interview!  We had several phone interviews and finally even a photo shoot as the article came closer to publishing date.

Several months had passed between the interviews and photo shoot, and just when John and I were wondering if they had forgotten about our article, I was contacted by the AP reporter – he emailed me to let me know that the story was waiting on a bunch of complementary pieces, but would be launching shortly.  “That’s exciting,” I thought, but was still eager to see the article as even more time passed.

A day before the release, our AP reporter friend gave us the heads up to keep an eye out for our article!  We were so excited!  On January 3, before I even got out of the gym and had seen the article myself, I had several missed text messages and phone calls – the story was out and many of my coworkers in Buffalo at Citi Bank had seen it! 

Elated, I opened my computer and excitedly sent out the first article I found to my mom.  Soon after, John said, “That’s weird, you just sent an article from the Dallas newspaper.”  I thought, “That is weird, I would have thought this would be a WNY thing…”

Turns out it wasn’t!  Our picture and the tagline of “Melissa Grothues and John Steele bailed from Buffalo last year” was on nearly every major news website – including ABC news, Yahoo!, and many others.  Christina looked up statistics and by 9:00AM PST it was on over 75 websites and was being clicked once every two seconds!!!  Truly our five minutes of fame!

Early afternoon on that same day, John and I started getting texts that we were on the front page of Yahoo!  And lo and behold, we were!  I quickly emailed a screen shot to my coworkers and posted one on my Facebook, because I couldn’t get over the fact that ON YAHOO, was mine and John’s smiling faces with a gorgeous San Diego backdrop, and the article’s lovely tagline – MY NAME WAS ON THE FRONT PAGE OF YAHOO!

A few days passed and the glory began to fade, but not for long!  On Sunday, January 12, John and I were featured on the cover of NY State Newspaper!  Although we obviously weren’t there to see it ourselves, the texts and calls began coming through early morning as our family and friends collected their newspapers from out front!   I’m pretty sure our whole family now thinks we’re super famous =P

So that’s the story of how John and I got featured in a nation-wide news article.  It was quite exciting and I can’t wait until the next time we’re front-page news, and especially front page Yahoo! News!