by Jason Salas, KUAM News Friday, December 15, 2006 Subscribe to Jason's newsfeed   E-mail this article Printable version KUAM Toolbar Web Widgets Get RSS headlines

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On Thursday we reported what would be the 20,000th news item we've published for online distribution on KUAM.com. Twenty-freakin'-thousand. That's a huge amount of work to have pulled off in only six years. As chief architect for all the subsystems that make up KUAM's interactive properties, I've been letting exactly what that milestone means for us as a news gathering operation really sink in. And people apparently have caught on - prior to penning the commentary you're reading now, I'd gotten lots of congratulatory e-mails from people who grokked our landmark achievement merely from the story's URL.

Equally remarkable is that the reporter who did the story, John Davis, is KUAM's newest addition. He's adding to the position we've cemented as Guam's most dominant broadcast company and is already building his own legacy as a KUAM reporter. As for who's gotten us this far in the first place, look no further than the names you already know.

We've had an impressive cadre of columnists, bloggers, reporters and contributors develop content for KUAM.com over the years, but our core group constitutes the vast majority of the stories you've followed. Mindy Fothergill, our most tenured reporter, has personally authored more than 38% of what lies within our mammoth archive. And Sabrina Salas Matanane, who's own work on the editorial, cosmetic and functional legs of the site can't be understated, accounts for better than a fifth of the total stories published. Jean Hudson, Marissa Borja, Clynt Ridgell, Fredalynn Mortera Hecita and Sonya Artero continue to populate the site with the day's events in a myriad of formats (text, audio, video, etc.), and former KUAM personalities like Yanna Person, Ken Wetmore, Gracie Cayanan, Stephanie Lum, Shawn Gumataotao, Andi Atteberry, Rachel Taimanao, Jay Pascua and Gerry Cruz all made their mark over the years documenting the Guam experience.

(Yours truly is still extremely proud of his meager contributions, too, having written about 11% of our stories.)

And all of our articles are fully searchable and accessible, unmetered and without cost to you. It's one of the driving forces that led us to receive this year's National Edward R. Murrow Award as Best Small Market News Web Site.

What I find most noteworthy is how we've continually responded to the insatiable demand for information, and managed to alter people's usability behavior. We've dramatically ramped up the volume of content we release and the frequency with which we push it out; while Year 1 saw us upload about 860 stories, we're on pace to do more than 4,300 articles in 2006. That's an extraordinary amount of work for a market this small.

But maybe that's the point: through interactive media we've been able to extend our effective reach far beyond the limitations of our traditional broadcast signals. In short, we've changed the way you get news. And obviously, it's worked out really nicely.

So here's to 20,000...and counting! Keep on checking us out - we'll be here.