There are many things to discuss below, which was forwarded to me yesterday. What's up exactly with citizen journalism? Should payment be determined by story popularity? Is this a cautionary tale for freelancers submitting online content? Why is my stomach rumbling at 3:44 PM? And so on.

Dear Creative Reporter,

Creative Reporter has grown to exponentially to nearly 1500 registered reporters in all parts of the world since its inception in October 2005. We thank you for participating, and hope you have found it valuable to have your writings highlighted on our network of 70+ blogs.

As you know we have launched a new version in April of this year that allows you to create posts and submit them directly to a blog in the Creative Weblogging network. Posts are now highlighted in the sidebar of the blog you are submitting to (in the little grey boxes on the right column of each blog).

Since the change we saw a spike of activity and many articles are being submitted every day. In addition, many Creative Reporters are simply submitting links to articles of interest.

Two big changes that we are implementing right now:

1) Posts are now being published to the main section of a blog only as selected by the Editor of a blog. In the past we allowed automated posting to the blog's main page when a Creative Reporter article reached 200 clicks. However, many submissions were unrelated to the subject matter of the blog where they were submitted, and had little or no relevance to the blog topic. Going forward, our blog Editors will choose the submissions based on popularity (number of clicks), quality of the writing, and relevance to the blog's topic.

2) We have had a number of challenges with regard to submissions. Many times the submissions were simply links, and not articles. In other cases it turned out the articles had been copied word-for-word from another source and submitted as the author's original work, when in fact they were not. Due to these and similar types of issues, we are discontinuing payment of royalties (even when a post is published by an Editor on the blog's main section).

Both changes are effective on August 10, 2006.

We will be paying out any open balances at or around August 25, 2006.

In order to retrieve an open balance you need to do the following not later than August 24th midnight:

A) Log in and enter a valid Paypal Email address (if you have not done so already)

B) Go to the payment page:

You just need to review it once - our payment mechanism will automatically be triggered if you access the page.

C) Receive your payment via Paypal on August 25th (no further action required)

3) What we plan in the near future:

Over the past year we have learned a lot from you. We have learned that the majority of Creative Reporters value one thing most: visibility for their articles.

The good news is that we will be making more changes to the Creative Reporter system, to give you more public visibility for original writings you submit. The benefits of Creative Reporter will continue to include:

- ability for your articles to be published on some of the Web's most popular niche blogs;

- the chance to develop greater visibility and reputation in your
chosen field of interest by being published on our blogs;

- the opportunity to be tapped for Editor positions at our blogs (several of our Editors started out as Creative Reporters); and

- you will be able to use Creative Reporter in your native language (Chinese, German) soon.

Thank you, and we look forward to your writings and your feedback and input.

Best Regards,

Your Creative Weblogging Team