CONK! Website to Relaunch as "Collaborative Newspaper"

Offline for four years, one of the Web's most popular original communities to return in a unique "collaborative publishing" format.

Minneapolis, MN (PRWEB) March 16, 2006 -- Before the end of this month, Arrow Media of Minneapolis will relaunch CONK! (http://conk.com), formerly one of the Internet's most popular online communities now defunct since 2001, as a unique "collaboratively published" online newspaper.

The new format will mix text news stories, blog postings, photos, podcasts and video feeds from established mainstream news sources with user-submitted content on the same footing and emphasis in real time, creating what Arrow Media CEO James Touchi-Peters (pronounced "TOO-shee PEE-ters") calls "an endless and instantly-changing river of news" per channel category. User submissions will be published immediately, but can be removed by votes from the community if not up to standards. News will be gathered in over two dozen interest channels and cross-referenced to 25 U.S. metro locations to start.

"Our goal is to make CONK! the first stop in posting any user-created content on the Web," said Touchi-Peters. In addition to news content, users also will be able to post audio and video, personal journal entries, classified ads, product/service reviews and even uncategorized pages containing anything they desire. The service will be ad-supported and completely free to use.

The CONK! website has one of the Web's more colorful histories. Launched in October 1996, the first iteration boasted a staff of professional writers that posted original humor-based takes on the news each weekday ("well before The Daily Show," said Touchi-Peters), as well as a very active and popular member community. CONK! was one of the first sites on the Web to produce professional audio and video webcasts especially for the medium, recognized by The Hollywood Reporter in 1999 as having produced the first video "mini-series" specifically for the Internet ("Noah's Ark").

The original CONK! was ranked by Media Metrix as one of the top 500 websites in the world for the entirety of its run, showing 15 million pages to 2.5 million unique visitors per month at its height. Arrow Media pulled the service in early 2001 after five years of losses due to insufficient advertising revenue. The company decided to re-enter the market last year after it was apparent that advertising models on the Web were finally working.

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