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For over a year now, I have been the Lead Editor at NewsOne.com.

Many of our loyal readers who visit the site like the turn it has taken, while others don’t. As our site has grown, the amount of emails with feedback we have received has increased as well. I am grateful for the feedback whether it be positive or negative because we aren’t here to just do what we’d like, but what our audience requests and needs.

Within the last year and a half, we have grown from a site that had a blog like feel, to one that is now a partner with another prominent African American news website, TheGrio; and has partnerships with some of the biggest names on the web like The Huffington Post, Newser, and The Daily Beast to name a few. We went through a site redesign, leadership changes, and built some new relationships that have and will serve us well in the future.

As of today, due to the hard work we’ve done, we’ve grown to average 1 million unique visitors a month. A great accomplishment that is double of what we averaged at this time last year. But even if the lifeblood of websites nowadays is advertising and traffic numbers, it’s not all about that for us. A topic that our readers know all too well about from some of the comments I’ve read, and from some of the content we’ve posted for those purposes only (just being honest).

In the last 4 months, NewsOne has taken a stronger look and approach towards the editorial content on the site. Not the aggregated content, but the original material. We did an expose on the history of a Harlem Sewage Plant, and corrected one of the biggest newspapers in the country, the NY Daily News, on one of the stories they wrote which contained an error.

Many websites across the Internet rely on aggregation, but we don’t want to be a website where you get updated on Black news from other entities. We want to be a site that creates that news. And while many of the budgets across the web are small as are the staffs, we will try our best to continue to provide you with original content.

We also want to make sure we stay engaged with our audience through the comments section and social media outlets like Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter.

In the coming year, we will be faced with the possible re-election of President Barack Obama. While many on this site have been critical of our coverage of the president (too biased in his favor), I wanted to say that I feel we have covered him from a plethora of angles.

We do support the president in his reelection bid because we believe his policies are well intended to help the Black community. Whether they have to date or not is a different discussion. And while many will point to rising Black unemployment, foreclosure numbers, and even the Latino community can point to increased deportations, do we really think those numbers would be better under a Republican president?

In final, I want to once again thank our readers for the continued support of our website. I am looking forward to incorporating citizen journalism into the site in the coming year where we will have NewsOne readers from across the country contributing news pieces in areas the mainstream ignores.

Our mission is to not only educate and inform the Black community, but serve it as well; and we promise to continue growing at the job we’re doing in the coming year.

*Please leave any feedback whether positive or negative in the comments section. And please supply us with suggestions for content, etc., that you would like to see (more of/less of) on the site. Last, but not least, if you are interested in contributing to the site, please visit the site on Monday as I will provide an email address for reader pitches *