Salem-News.com by the Numbers

Salem-News.com is one of the only Internet news sites in the world that is not the offshoot of a newspaper or broadcast station.

(SALEM) - Thousands of visitors a day, millions of hits a month. Watching the growth of this news organization has been an interesting and eye opening experience. We always knew the capitol city needed more news coverage, and we always knew that people in other places found Salem interesting, but we had no idea that the news site would gain visitors at the rate that it has. Salem-News.com visitorship is running way ahead of predictions. A search of “Salem-News.com” in quotes under Google brings more than 25,000 results now. The fascinating part is that many of the entries are for the sites that link to Salem-News.com for their own news. The Internet is a different kind of place, and a large number of sites do not actually produce their own content. Each time a person decides to view one of the linked stories, it sends them straight to Salem-News.com. Some of our biggest recent stories include the shooting of a woman in Albany who was wanted by police, the desecration of the local Sikh Temple, and the tragic death of Thomas Tucker of Madras, Oregon, in Iraq. Comments and the general ability to interact with stories has been another compelling part of the operation. When our Web designer Matt Lintz implemented the comments section, the local corporate-owned daily followed suit within one week. They aren’t very original, but following our lead tells us that a small handful of people in the role of David can easily snap rocks at Goliath while keeping pace well ahead. Corporations that care more about their bottom line than journalism are poisoning their own well without realizing it. It was mid-June when Google News picked us up and made Salem-News.com one of the 4,500 sites in the world that supplies news to the rest of the world. Shortly after that, we saw a story on Army Pfc Thomas Tucker receive its 100th comment. Gaining visitors and establishing a place where Americans can talk about tragedy and heal has been fulfilling and rewarding for our humble staff. Now through Google Analytics, we can determine how many people visit Salem-News.com each day, and we can see where they come from. For example, the site gets a lot of traffic from Portland, Oregon, more than we anticipated before we could gauge it. Visitors come to Salem-News.com from every continent, and Brazil competes with Canada as the second largest international location that visits Salem-News.com. All told, it has been a great ride so far. Since launching our streaming video news reports, our archive has grown to contain more than 40 stories that are always available to watch. The number keeps growing each week. We watch our competition as they try to do the same thing, learning we can only hope, that the skills required to produce quality video reports often require several years of experience. We are honored to be the only news site that has a core team comprised of U.S. military veterans. This is extremely important during a time of war, because the majority of the nation’s news reporters have never served. Part of the success has to be attributed to the fact that all Salem-News.com archives are available permanently, and you will never have to pay to see them. We hope that as other media groups attempt to follow our steps, they learn that there are things they can do, like eliminating the cost for looking at stories more than a week old. Many of the people who need the archives are college students, and they are financially challenged. High school students would have to produce a credit card just to look at a story and it is not right. The bar has officially been lowered, somebody needs to stick a block underneath it to stop its further descent. Thousands of visitors a day, millions of hits a month, local ownership, and a fresh perspective. Salem-News.com proves once and for all that Oregon's capitol city is totally competitive and on a level with Portland, even setting the pace on the state's broadcast level. Last year we were named the number two broadcast contributor for The Oregon Associated Press, and our news partnership with Oregon's number #1 Newsradio 1190 KEX means another 50,000 listeners each day hear our news over the AM airwaves. Most importantly, we have established that while the Web is a worldwide medium, it is a place for local news produced by local people. It will take some more time for this concept to come forward, but not that much time, and as video streaming reaches all new highs, Salem-News.com is on a collision course with technological developments that make the Internet nearly explode with viability. Stay tuned, because in addition to Oregon's best multi-media news on demand, we have many, many more things for our visitors to look forward to. Parties interested in investing in Salem-News.com should forward their interest via email to: tim@salem-news.com