Greetings from Three Rivers, Michigan!

I'm pleased to report that my new venture with "grassroots journalism" is now online.  I began populating the River Country Journal on April 25th and have been adding content daily since then.  If you'd like to "check in out," go to www.rivercountryjournal.com.

I just ran across information about a resource that may be helpful to all of us interested in "grassroots online journalism."  It's a Legal Guide from The Berkman Center at Harvard Law School's "Citizen Media Law Project" (CMLP).  Here's some descriptive information about it:

Hello, again, from Michigan!

Just a quick note regarding another helpful resource I discovered recently.  It's the USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review from the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.  It's free and the website provides a good deal of helpful and pertinent information about online journalism.  I registered several months ago and have been receiving regular e-mail newsletters about the website.  If you'd like to check it out, go to www.ojr.org.

Hello, again, from Michigan!

First, sorry it's been so long since I've been on the site.  Best of intentions; worst of execution.  I just started a part-time job and my wife is battling a health issue that consumes a lot of my extra time.

Here's where we are, two months into a fully redesigned website:

Readership is solid.  Format changes often bring reader disruption.  Not this time.  Numbers stayed steady.  We do between 12 and 17,000 visits a day between the two main publictions, fultondailynews.com and oswegodailynews.com.

Greetings from Michigan!

I ran across a website today that looks like it could prove quite helpful to those of us involved -- or about to be involved -- in small, local journalism business enterprises.  Here's the website address:  www.workingsolo.com.  See what you think.

Best wishes!

Bruce Snook

So the first live webcast is in the books.  I give it an 85.
>>  We started late, with just two minutes to go in the first half.  We had a "technical issue".  A replacement cable was missing and was sitting 15 miles away in the office.  So we fired it up as fast as we could and got on...well....not cleanly, but we got on.

A quick update on the live sports broadcast project:
The game's two days away -- a routine game, nothing special.  We've already gotten three sponsors for the game without putting a ton of effort into it.

I've been down sick a few days, which is why I haven't been posting. Brings up an interesting and important matter, though - Health Insurance.
I can't afford it now (living at the poverty level), but once I get to the point where I have employees, they're going to have super benefits. Will help me attract talented people as well as being the right thing to do.
Any independent publishers out there paying for insurance?
I've been extremely lucky the last 2.5 years (except for once...), but I know it won't last forever.
Thoughts on this?

Here's an idea for the group:  Local high school sports webcasts.
We're airing our first game a week from now and sponsor reaction has been strong.  We're going to wind up with at least one sponsor who has turned down every proposal we've made to them for the last ten years.  Several others have shown interest and I'm sure we'll pull in plenty of sponsors. (I promise to update you by mid-winter, when we'll be in full swing.)