Atlantic Free Press: When Internet news become dangerous

The Atlantic Free Press shares their encounter with death threats for a writer on the subject of the NRA:

From the Netherlands, the U.K. and Canada the editorial team here at Atlantic and Pacific Free Press wishes you all a wonderful holiday season.

Dear Contributors,

American writer, media analyst and New Yorker magazine alumni A. J. Liebling, 1904-1963 once wrote:

"The function of the press in society is to inform, but its role in society is to make money.”

In the New Age of Media in a New Age of Information this is clearly no longer the case.

The role of Atlantic/Pacific Free Press and others like us that have sprung up on the net is to inform and not to make money. Advertisers or potential advertisers play no part in our editorial decisions. Selling print magazines (circulation) is not going to make or break us.

During a recent head-on collision with the NRA, Atlantic Free Press received many emails from members of the organization who threatened to contact our advertisers and threatened to cancell their subscription to our magazine. I was rather bemused. We do carry ads from progressive companies and organizations via blogads (helps cover the server costs) but to contact them to stop would be rather futile. We don't rely in any way on what advertising we have to exist. Nor do we have a paid subscription service so threats in that department are moot.

There is, frankly, nothing more satisfying as a publisher - not to feel the traditional heat or threats from politicians and advertisers on content that one finds in 'normal' media relationships. We are not slaves to their ethos - and we can reach the people... and do reach a lot of new eyeballs everyday via Google News... the shackles of the past are simply not there today.
I wish you all the best in the year to come.
Regards
R.G. Kastelein
Groningen, Netherlands
editor@atlanticfreepress.com
Some facts about our publications.
- Atlantic and Pacific Free Press are both official Google News Sources which means the works are featured alongside the New York Times, The Guardian, The Independent, the Washington Post and other highbrow mainstream media on a daily basis.
- Atlantic Free Press is syndicated by Newstex.com and appears in Lexis Nexis - therefore available to thousands of viewers worldwide who are in closed networks at their workplace.
- Atlantic Free Press celebrated it's first anniversary in September 2007 with nearly 3000 articles published the first year.

The article which launched the collision was this one by Jayne Lyn Stahl
http://www.atlanticfreepress.com/content/view/2576/81/

Published with permission of the Atlantic Free Press.