Editorial
This week’s issue is our 52nd, which means we’ve reached our one year anniversary. We’ve published almost 1,000 news articles, countless event listings and classified ads, worked with over forty freelance contributing reporters and interns, and had our pages viewed almost 250,000 times.
We started as a bootstrap operation, testing the market, building our news team, and developing a brand. The decision to publish weekly was partially to establish a schedule for evolving into a printed weekly – perhaps the only newspaper model succeeding amidst today’s media cannibalization.
Publishing weekly was also a practical decision to maximize the capacity our financial model afforded. At some point we’ll move to daily updates, but we want to make sure that our readers aren’t disappointed by the quantity and quality of our news.
The first six months we were not dependent on support from Advertisers, but in the fourth quarter of 2009 we began to build a foundation of support from local businesses. As a community news provider, we’ll continue to count on the community businesses, as well as look to grow our readership and appeal to international marketers.
The future looks promising, with the Rio oil business booming, and the mega-events of the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics around the corner. Over the next three years we hope to develop into a first-class news operation capable of providing premium content to the world.
Some exciting additions in the near future will be a writing program to develop English language journalism among NGO schools in Rio’s underprivileged communities. Another major effort planned for later in the year will be the addition of video news reports, and as mentioned before, adding a printed weekly version.
For now we’re happy take pause, and reflect on our success in the last year, and plan a one year anniversary party… More to come on this soon.
Thank you all so much for your support, and please continue to give us feedback and ideas on how to improve.
Sincerely,
Stone Korshak
Editor and Publisher
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