Happy New Year!!

It's been just over a year since Broowaha opened its doors and next year will be just as exciting... so we wanted to send a note to wish you a happy new year and to let you know about the plans in store that will help Broowaha grow!


Please excuse the mess: Broowaha will be getting new features and designs. Most of these changes will be very obvious. We are constantly coming up with new ideas and design solutions to make your experience on the site richer and easier. If you have suggestions, don't hesitate to send them to info@broowaha.com.


Anyone can join....really: In the past, to contribute to Broowaha you had to join one of cities that belonged to our pre-existing network. Now, anyone can join and publish work, even if they aren't writing about one of the cities in our network. That work will still appear at Broowaha.com. If you belong to a network, your work will appear on the main page and a local edition as well. We will also continue to create new editions at the request of users, so don't be shy to suggest a new one at http://www.broowaha.com/network.php.

New editor, same style: We have a new editor! David Cohn (known as Digidave at Broowaha) comes to us with experience as a professional journalist, writing for Wired, Columbia Journalism Review and the New York Times - and he is also is a strong believer in citizen journalism! David recently organized the first Networked Journalism Summit where he became interested in and later joined the BrooWaha team. In the beginning, the team consisted of one member: a programmer (Ariel, Founder) who needed an editor for his growing citizen journalism network. David was a natural addition: a journalist who worked on building citizen journalism projects but lacked development skills. We hit it off and the rest is history. David won't be doing any heavy editing - this will still remain a project where you, the authors, write what you want; but he is around for any advice or general chatting. Feel free to contact him at david@broowaha.com.

New interface: You have been requesting it for months, and it's finally here: BrooWaha now has a spell-checker for your articles! In addition to that, we've also changed the writing interface to make it easier for you to use italic, create bullet points, and also add links to your articles. You now have no excuse not to link your article to your sources!! ;-)

New collaborative projects: Soon, Broowaha will unleash a new feature called "Call for Contributions". These will be networked stories. Our editor will make calls for stories on specific subjects. One month, the assignment might be to interview a local band, the next month it might be to take a picture of construction in your city. The goal is to find stories that we can all work on and, by combining our efforts, the sum of our work will be greater than the parts.


You continue to rock: Every month, starting in January, we will feature one of you as the writer. This site is nothing without you - and we know that. Therefore, you can look forward to continued recognition for a job well done!

Seriously, you rock!
We can't thank you enough for being part of BrooWaha. We hope that the changes we make in the coming weeks will make your experience on the site better and get your stories in front of more eyes.

Happy New Year from the staff here at BrooWaha; we look forward to a fantastic 2008 full of great writing, great pictures, and great community.

Until next time,

Ariel Vardi, Founder

PS- for more about David Cohn, your new editor, check out his freshly published interview here.