For 200 Weeks

Editorial

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – This is our 200th Weekly Online edition with our reporters working and writing over the weekend, and our editing team (mainly me) working Sundays through Tuesdays to get our best and most current news out for Wednesday morning. For two hundred weeks we’ve managed to get this done rain or shine, holiday or sick day, and it feels great.

We’ve had perhaps a hundred reporters come and go since we started, everyone works freelance so many move on to full-time jobs or are really just traveling through. We have had some great ones, some really committed writers and journalists that have been like family.

Some are so helpful and involved that they help out with editing on the above mentioned sick days, and pinch hit for other reporters that miss the mark for various reasons. We also have some that write for a few weeks or so and it doesn’t work out, either because they’re not up to it or they get called back home, and that’s okay.

As a community news publisher, we are only able to keep a team of freelance reporters, each contributing a couple stories per week, and as I mentioned a lot come and go. Yet because we’ve established ourselves, we are always getting better qualified inquiries, and getting our best reporters better paying freelance work for larger news companies.

One of our best guys has even picked up a semi-regular (paid) radio commentator gig, and we were able to get a few of our most experienced writers some great paying work for a travel guide book recently. Not to mention the random requests from news companies and researchers around the world.

And so it goes week-after-week, two hundred times now, for almost four years (not to mention the Daily articles we started mid-2011). In between those we also publish our Monthly Print edition, and this month will be our 24th, two years of editing, layout, printing, distribution and more distribution.

None of it would be possible without our Advertising partners; especially those that have been with us since the beginning. It is working with them that makes this publication possible, and easily is half of what our operation does. If you are reading this and have a chance, don’t be afraid to thank them for us.

As publisher, editor, advertising sales guy, designer, web guy, delivery guy, and administrative assistant, it has dawned on me that The Rio Times will never make me rich. But in the last year we’ve been able to pay most of our bills, and not only do we live in the Cidade Maravilhosa, but we live in a place experiencing incredible social change and will soon host the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics.

So, two hundred weeks later, from The Rio Times, thank you.