Salem-News.com Growth Means Changes

The switchover to a bigger, more capable server means a few functions may not be up until the week begins.

(SALEM) - Salem-News.com has experienced steady growth over its first two years, but nobody expected the site to zoom to the top of the Web rankings almost overnight, which is exactly what happened when Salem-News.com was added to the Google News feed in the middle of June.

Google, the world’s most widely used search engine, gathers stories from 4,500 news organizations around the world. The stories are supplied on "Google News" which can be broken down into world, national, etc.

Google features a paragraph, sometimes a photo, and a link to the original story. Salem-News.com has hit the cover or top of the news in the domestic section three times in the last two weeks, driving all kinds of national and world web visitors to Salem, Oregon to get their top national stories.

As a result of Google’s acceptance, Salem-News.com has become a news organization that is constantly billed next to stories from CNN and the BBC, as well as NW news organizations like local newspapers and Portland TV stations.

Now, more than 1,400 other Web sites are linking to Salem-News.com for stories. As soon as the site was added to the Google News Feed, Salem-News.com was also added to Yahoo’s national news feed.

One Salem-News.com story on Oregon Pfc. Thomas Tucker was also added to the front of the Yahoo News page, driving thousands of visitors to Salem-News.com. As expected, the sudden burst of visitors has increased the demand on our local server, and now Salem-News.com has formed a relationship with a new server provider that should provide flawless service for our visitors.

A few more tweaks and adjustments are being made over the next few days, and Salem-News.com will be better and more reliable than ever. We appreciate your patience because there have been some short periods of "down time" but with the switchover to the new service provider, we should be running smoothly again.

We are proud to have gained this significant placement for the sake of Salem-News.com, but it is also positive for the area as a whole and the image of people who live here.

Because Salem is one hour away, many if not most of the significant community stories here get missed by Portland TV stations. It is too far to travel for them.

So Salem and the mid-valley, and the central coast get little coverage. Unlike television news, the Internet has no "TV market" structure that it has to follow. Salem does have a TV station, one year ago last April KWVT Channel-52 UHF celebrated its first birthday, but the powerhouse stations that supply news to Western Oregon are based in Portland.

There are no "TV News Market" rules from the federal government saying there can only be so many Internet news organizations in a particular region.

New media, which is the buzz term for the growing Internet news movement, breaks the back of the system that has always given Portland the state's major media presence, while the capitol languishes in the background.

The Internet is a worldwide tool, but Salem-News.com has demonstrated that the Internet is the single best delivery system for local news that has ever been created.

We produce video stories that are on demand, we feature audio news reports, all of our stories are accompanied by a photo or image, and last week we launched our new photo layout pages that allow print photojournalism to carry out a bigger role.

When Salem-News.com was created, we elected to go with the "every story has an image or photo" protocol, and that seems to be one of the particular things that Google likes, as other media groups often leave the photo out.

Now we frequently see Salem-News.com photos placed next to stories that originate from different organizations.

We also knew from the beginning that we would strive to keep all story, photo and video archives available in perpetuity. Unlike our local competition that charges people to look at a story when it becomes a week old, we will never charge people to simply pull up a news story.

Nearly every Salem-News.com story is already posted on Google in one form or location or another all all over the Web for that matter, it can all be found easily on the site also.

Our photos fill the Google "Images" ranks. People who look for information on Salem and the mid-valley on the Web find Salem-News.com. It is our desire to represent this section of Oregon in the best possible way.

As always, we greatly appreciate the ability to serve you and all feedback that is e-mailed to us at newsroom@salem-news.com is reviewed. You might be surprised, let us know what you think, and how you would like to see Salem-News.com improve.