ANDERSON — The noise was muffled but steady. As I opened my eyes, I remember wondering: What is that? It was coming from outside, but at 6 a.m., I was thinking slow and moving slower.

Soon I signed on to my home computer, and the first thing I saw was the home page of IndependentMail.com. Immediately I saw a headline and clicked on it. A police officer had been shot. A manhunt was in progress.

Then it hit me. That noise was a helicopter. The shooting scene was nearby. I made sure our doors were locked, then came back and refreshed the story. Details – and a photo – had been added.

Pearce Adams was hard at work.

In a little while, local television stations were starting to report the “breaking news.”

“Other media were there, and it was a race,” Pearce recalled. “On stories like these, we’re all racing to see who can get it posted first. It’s a thrill to go on our Web site and see that we have it and others don’t.”

In the old days, it would have been 24 hours before people read about this in their newspaper. But these days, thanks to the Internet, we can report today’s news today. Right now.

Pearce has been at this for a year now. Previously he covered news in northeast Georgia. He was good at it, and he enjoyed it. Not coincidentally, he lives in northeast Georgia.

But we felt a need to step up what we call our “Web First” reporting. Other reporters are pushed to report news stories online first and fast, then write their story for the newspaper. We wanted to take the next step, assigning a reporter to write exclusively for IndependentMail.com. Some stories are “reverse published” in the newspaper, but they always would appear online first.

Pearce can tell us now what his reaction was when we first approached him about this assignment.

“I thought, ‘I’m outa here. I can’t do that,’” he said. “I got used to a routine in Georgia.”

Our expectation was 10 stories per day.

“I’m thinking, ‘How many? There’s no way I can do that,’” he said. “Now, after a year, that’s a slow day.”

Our “mojo” – mobile journalist – starts his day at 4:30 a.m. His office is on wheels. His tools include a laptop computer with a wireless card, a digital camera, a cell phone with a camera and a police scanner. Now we’re getting him acquainted with a video camera.

He covers the courts and sifts through incident reports at the Anderson Police Department and Anderson County Sheriff’s Office, looking for news that is either important or interesting. He writes his own creative headlines on the stories he posts, and with his nose for out-of-the-ordinary news, he seems to have developed both a cult following and critics.

“It’s different,” he said. “If you’re a race car driver and you’ve been sitting in pit row for a year and now you’re behind the wheel, there’s no desire to go back to pit row.”

Don Kausler Jr., editor of the Independent-Mail, can be reached at (864) 260-1249 or by e-mail at kauslerdh@IndependentMail.com.