Thursday, May 6, 2010

DeafWeekly - Where do you find Deaf-related news

I am impressed with http://deafweekly.com/. It gathers all kinds of news relating to the Deaf and Hard of Hearing community from all over the world and puts the news on a central website. That is really neat. I took the liberty to contact Tom Willard, the founder of DeafWeekly.com and conduct a short interview with him via emails.

deafweekly

Here is what I have learned.

1) Is Deafweekly.com Deaf-owned?
Yes, I am the owner and I am deaf. I went deaf slowly between the ages of 8 and 22. I didn't have much exposure to the deaf world until I went to college at NTID/RIT but that was 30 years ago and I've been involved with the deaf community ever since..

2) How did you come up with the idea for Deafweekly?
I have a long history in deaf journalism going back to when I was editor of the NTID student newspaper. I was also editor of Silent News and Newswaves, two national newspapers for the deaf. When I started Deafweekly, there were some web services that listed deaf-related articles, but who had time to read them all? I decided that I would provide this service so that others could easily keep up with the deaf news just by reading Deafweekly. The first issue came out in Oct. 2004 and last October we marked our fifth anniversary. The first 4+ years, I wrote the whole thing myself, reading each article and writing capsule summaries. It got to be too much, and last July I switched to a different format and now I just include a brief portion of the stories with links to the full articles. By the way, most of the deaf-related print publications have gone out of business, killed by the Internet. I am glad to not have to pay printing and postage bills, as that was always a challenge.

3) Do you have any plans to expand or perhaps hire other employees?
No, as I don't think it is necessary. Sometimes people will suggest ways to improve Deafweekly but I always ask, will this help sell more ads? If not, then it comes down to me doing more work and getting paid less. Our only source of revenue is advertising, since it is free to subscribe. There are not a lot of companies interested in advertising in deaf publications and it's always a challenge to sell ads but we're doing okay ..

4) What is the biggest challenge you see coming up regarding Deafweekly and news regarding Deaf and Hard of Hearing communities across the world?
I don't see many challenges because deaf people will always be making news in one way or another. One small concern: if news websites start charging money to access their content, it would make it more difficult for me to alert people to links of deaf news.

5) Have you ever consider or foresee the possibility of establishing some sort of News station where reporters would sign out different news and events including yours? (FYI, there are few websites that are already doing this).
No, not at all. Deafweekly is what it is. It's for people who like to read as opposed to those who prefer to get their info via sign language. And as you said, there are already websites doing video news so what is the point of Deafweekly doing it too? It would just be a lot more work with no corresponding increase in income.

Thank you Tom Willard for your excellent work on finding Deaf-related news from all over the world and putting the news into a nice format that makes it easy to read. Thank you again.

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