New Online Publication

My start-up online news publication will certainly have a smaller budget than the New York Times or CNN.com. In order to overcome our lack of cash, and compete with these news giants, my publication will adopt a plan similar to the one laid out by Spot.US. We will call upon our readership to donate money to support our news site. No user would be willing to send a single dime for a story that was already covered by the Times or any other larger publication. So, like Spot.US, we will use this money to focus our efforts on stories that have been ignored by other sites. It is our idea that people will jump at the opportunity to donate money to fund a story that is important to them. Unlike Spot.US, users will not be donating money for every story they want to see in print. Spot.US has a policy where they ask for approximately $25 to aid a journalist to report on a single story. My publication finds this procedure far too risky and potentially upsetting to certain users. What happens when a reader donates money and is unsatisfied with the final piece? What happens when a contributor feels a piece is too brief or did not go into adequate detail? In an attempt to snuff out complaints and problems before they arise, my publication has come up with a different approach to gathering funds. Our site will be free for all web users to access. However, in order to have any input into what stories get reported on, a user must pay a $60 annual membership. After donating this annual fee the user will be free to post on our bulletin board where subscribers will be asked to leave messages for our staff. Subscribed users will be able to leave story leads and other ideas on this bulletin board.

As Josh Korr says, online publications cannot take the endless resources around them for granted. These sites can't just be a basic rehash of what appears in a newspaper or magazine. These web pages need to have videos, interactive options, and most importantly helpful links. Korr addresses the fact that online users rarely want incredibly long, dry pieces overflowing with facts and figures. Deploying reporters overseas or across the country is quite pricey. And, as I said before, my publication does not have a deep wallet. With this in mind, we must note that a subscription to the AP is also expensive, and may be a budgetary concern. One of my ideas is to concentrate mainly on hyperlocal reporting. We will deploy the majority of our reporters to cover local stories. But, we shall not forget the larger picture, and we absolutely will not neglect to report on important national or international news. Our idea is to provide a basic, inexpensive synopsis of major breaking stories that we cannot extensively report on. We will then feature dozens of links at the end of our brief synopsis. The links will send users to other publications or even blogs that cover the information we cannot obtain ourselves. This will save us money, still inform our users, and provide a greater readership to gifted bloggers. It will also definitely appease the young adults mentioned in Jim Kennedy's article. These users want reliable, thorough coverage of stories. They do not want snappy sound-bytes or snippets of useless information. We will provide our users with the extensive coverage they crave. We may not be able to do justice to every story by ourselves, but we will link to other sites that offer the vital information we lack.

Our local reporting will closely mirror the journalism done by Jame Gannon at the Rappahannock Voice online paper. We are aware that our task will be time-consuming, exceedingly demanding and offer very little financial reward. At the same time it is refreshing to be a small online publication for these reasons. We will have no ties to any companies and no loyalties to anyone else but our readers. For these reasons, we will be able to expose touchy stories, in the same way the Voice broke the story about the Inn in Little Washington. On a side note, our dot com name will let readers know we are an online news publication. It will be far more obvious than www.rappvoice.com, which sounds like some kind of hip-hop chatroom.