A Prototype for the Future of Internet News

We are looking for journalists and business partners who want to become involved in our mission to bring independently owned news Websites to the United States.

Photo courtesy: University of London

(SALEM, Ore.) - Our primary goal at Salem-News.com has always been to bring Oregon residents news they can really use in their life, without ignoring the cities and towns that exist in the state's outlying areas. We have now entered our fourth year of existence.

Our secondary goal has been to develop a news site with a framework that can be replicated, customized, and adapted to new regions. In some cases, we envision these operations as a sort of franchise, to bring news agencies to areas that like Salem, Oregon, receive little to no TV news coverage.

When the current Salem-News.com format entered the new design phase almost two years ago under Matt Lintz, we had a number of extremely important directives. The most important was that the site be created specifically for news delivery. It would need a video section, a comments section, and it would be a site that always used an image, either a photo or artwork. That was just the beginning too, we needed massive archive storage, we needed to make the system extremely stable and secure, and there were countless other tasks to develop and execute.

All of these most important needs were kept in mind by Lintz and the creation of what would become the nation's only truly independent high traffic news Website, was underway.

We calculated from the beginning that the idea could get serious traction. Salem-News.com was accepted by Google News by the summer of 2005, and soon we began seeing upwards of 12,000 unique visitors on many days.

We completed June, 2007 with 16,618 unique daily visitors.

Among our early aspirations was a desire to build a platform that could be replicated so that we can see similar operations throughout the country and world.

Now we are nearing the point where those other sites will be launched and it isn't just good news for us, it is great news for people everywhere who always wished their cities and towns had better news coverage. It also will mean new reporting and photography jobs for the new millennium.

Gaining Credibility

The first years of the Internet were a big letdown for our economy, and the "dot com crash" of the 1990's will never be forgotten by those who lost out financially. But the Internet has now progressed to the point where people mistakenly thought it was fifteen years ago, and the environment exists for all of the biggest Internet hopes and dreams to finally come true.

As most people who visit us regularly can imagine, our staff has been closely watching the development of Internet news for the last three years. All the sites that we monitor are offshoots of TV stations, radio stations and newspapers. There are a few beyond that on the national level, but almost all have a topic they specialize in or they are motivated around a particular political point of view.

For a while, a whole smattering of sites popped up in Oregon. They were all generic "cookie cutter" or "rubber stamp" sites with names like salemoregonnews.com and medfordoregonnews.com and each was a mirror of the next. At first we were very curious, assuming that these sites may be competition. There didn't seem to be a living person connected, it appeared that the site's 'robots' searched the Web for state press releases and published them as news stories.

These sites were initially accepted by the Google News feed, and would even bump Salem-News.com stories out of the running under the Google News "Oregon" search from time to time. But Google News seems to be on a perpetual self-improvement course and it didn't take long before those generic sites claiming to offer real news were out of the mix.

This brings us to another dilemma; the "citizen journalist" program that a few other rubber stamp sites have tried to bring forward. I don't know about you, but I want my news to have a professional delivery, I want it to come from an experienced reporter who is trained and knows the business. I don't think these sites with Tom, Dick and Harry giving you their copied and pasted news and reviews are worthy of our time, and they certainly would end up in court if they attempted to write actual stories without knowing how to do it properly.

We as a society need to resist the need to cheapen news and remember that there can be serious repercussions from bad reporting, it isn't something a person can just jump into. Blogs and other forms of Web interactivity exist that are more catered to hobbyist news junkies. Salem-News.com visitors can leave comments and sometimes they become far more interesting than the story they are attached to. But the comments are not being passed off as credible news reporting and it is a good system.

Our news station's philosophy is that no matter how convenient the medium becomes, it never erases the need to have skilled, experienced journalists generating the news. Sometimes people with limited skills can work well with direction, but they can not be turned loose on the world before they are competent at reporting.

Tracing News History

As journalism has evolved over the years, different vehicles have been used to deliver that information to the public. In the earliest days bell ringers walked the town calling out information to those in hearing range.

Then came the newspaper which created a lasting home for the printed words. The next news medium was the radio, and early radio broadcasts were extremely valuable for passing news along almost as it happened. After that came the movie theater newsreel.

We entered the world of television in 1947 and news took on a whole new meaning, with highly respected "TV personalties" news anchors, delivering the news of the day around the dinner hour.

Today, electronic news has found a new delivery system, and that is the Internet. The Web is the only news system that allows a person to actually interact with the people who deliver the news. Comments, blogs, emails, these are all perfect companions for the Internet news reporter of today, and the audience can be larger than ever.

Salem-News.com's Tim King spent two months covering a war last year, his only tools were a TV camera and a laptop computer, and when he could find it, an Internet signal. In the last twenty years of electronic media, news has indeed covered a lot of ground.

Time to Expand

We are looking for journalists who want to become involved in our mission to bring independently owned news Websites to the United States. Our system is fully functional and there is a long list of types of support we will provide for the new Internet news stations.

And as the technology has progressed, jobs in TV and newspaper reporting have become extremely competitive, and evolving technologies mean you have to know more than ever to keep up. Newspaper crews push to meet their daily deadlines and try to outrun the learning curve operating video cameras for their site, while TV crews work to produce reports for the 6:00 news and break news on the station's Website simultaneously. Considering all of this, it just seems natural that the Internet would evolve as the logical place for a person to choose for news.

Our company has thousands of archived articles, photos, pieces of artwork, and video to offer news professionals ready to explore the idea of running an Internet news station in their area. Our affiliates will be strongly supported by Salem-News.com. We have spent the years learning not just how to operate the news organization, but also how to build inroads that lead to a constant input of data containing valuable information for news articles.

We are in the process of developing affiliate manuals for operation and administration of a local news site. We are also implementing a training program for new affiliates. For more information on the future of news and your role in it, contact Tim King at tim@salem-news.com