Inventing a New Way to Report the News

November 23, 2005
This summer, I instituted a feature on OpEdNews that you probably won't see, unless you are a regular contributor to the site. It enables regular contributors, who I trust to write content that will work for OpEdNews, to submit their articles directly to the site via an article submission portal. Since July, when I started the program, about 60 writers have signed on.

The OpEdNews Trusted Author program enables them to get their ideas and words on the web, spiderable by google news in about one to two minutes from the time they finish writing. It also enables them to access their articles to correct or change them, as they need.

Each time an article is submitted, I get an email with the complete article and some details about the article-- word count, and other administrative details. That way, I can quickly edit or delete it. Most edits are for typos. Out of close to 1000 articles published this way, two have been deleted. A few have had minor edits. The program is working beautifully. The writers get their articles out, "live" much earlier. I don't miss any articles sent through email that get blocked by spam filters.

Then we went a step further and added a feature that is only to be found on OpEdNews. Writers can create articles with action pages that are designed specifically to enable readers to respond to the article they've just read-- to send a message to a legislator and/or local newspaper. Anthony Wade's new article The Party Of Lies, Swift-Boating The Truth, includes one. These articles also enable readers and the writer to check another file that shows a log of the last 25 messages submitted to legislators or local newspapers. For the first time, writers can energize and ENABLE action, then actually SEE how it was enacted.

For you, the reader, this means you get articles faster and often, you get them sooner, since when writers submit to our site, their articles show up immediately, while, if they submit to most other sites, they show up when an editor posts them, sometimes as much as half a day, or even days later. And it means you get great articles, because, from what the writers tell me, they really like the program and the technology.

If you are a writer interested in participating in this program, contact me at rob@opednews.com. Please include a link to past articles you've written and please read our writers guidelines.