A VISION FOR RFW: AM I DREAMING?

Here's what we hope to accomplish at RFW and why you should help. This is the last gust you'll hear from me on this issue for a long time.

It began about nine months ago. The idea was to have a site that strongly challenged the health status quo wherever it seemed to be necessary. This meant investigations, original features, carefully chosen links to stories that were being ignored, innovative columns that made people think, some biting humor, a way for people to interact instantly with something posted on the site and so on. The accent would be on freedom of expression. Debate of all sorts would be encouraged.

We’ve done a little of this and that and we’ve made our presence known - and strongly so - but we have a very long way to go to meet our initial goals.

This June, as I’m sure regular visitors to the site know, we’ve had our very first drive for subscriptions - for either the Health News Analyzer or the RFW Club. And as many of you are probably tired of hearing, we haven’t done so well. A relatively small group of good friends and regular visitors to the site have come through in a very modest but important way by showing their support, making it possible for us to continue. Not because there was enough money collected but because they showed they really cared and this was encouraging .And I want to thank them deeply for the confidence they’ve shown.

But it’s been a frustrating period too, because we know that there are many thousands of people who visit our site who have not been convinced it is a good thing to support RFW. Alas, this is the way of the Internet, although that will soon change. What will happen in the foreseeable future is that without strong support from regular users, sites such as RFW will have great difficulty staying alive. They will get overwhelmed by sites that support political and commercial agendas that will often be far removed from the kind of personal empowerment we want to offer at RFW. This is what many people do not understand.

When you start off on this kind of venture, you realize that your own pockets can only be depleted so much and then others will have to take over. Well, how do you do it? Do you go after ads? We could because we are now big enough in traffic to attract some attention. But I DON’T WANT TO. Do you start setting up a store where one day you will end up selling even motorcycles? DON’T WANT TO DO THAT EITHER. So, you think, well, what can RFW offer people that might give them more knowledge and more access to quality information about health and health trends? That’s why we have the two subscriptions. If you read what they provide, you’ll know that this is not something you are going to get anywhere else on the Internet.

In any case, I've been banking on QUALITY - the idea that people want QUALITY information and that they have had enough of the zoo that the Internet is becoming. Too many sites pushing dross and gadgets. Too many sites doing rip-off instant quickies on the latest phenomenon - terrorism, or whatever, and scaring the hell out of people - but yeah, making some money from it.

Maybe I am a dreamer but I have now devoted 9 months of my time to building RFW and I do not plan to give up easily.

I think optimistically, although I’m sure some people would call it a bunch of fantasy.

I wonder what would happen if the majority of the thousands of regular visitors to this site each week bought one annual subscription for $50. What could we do with that?

An amazing amount of things because we have a small staff and no offices as such (for example, associate editor, Cory Mermer, is in New Jersey and I’m based in Montreal along with my wife Barbara Lewis, and Yves Gigon, our site's technical wizard (who would love to be able to show you what a powerfully interactive health site could look like) ) and so we’re not about to piddle away (or "burn") a ton of cash on fancy furniture or limos, as many of the idiot start-up companies did when they began to cash in on investor mania not all that long ago.

Here are some of the things we could do to benefit YOU.

More investigations and breaking news that has real impact. We’ve had to put all our investigations on hold because they are resource consuming. This has saddened me greatly because my long expertise as a journalist in print, radio, magazines, books and the last decade, in TV news, is in doing this type of work.

More original features. The Internet should NOT solely be a grab palace of links. When you have the type of journalistic expertise associated with RFW, you want to let these people dig and come up with stories that will change lives for the better. This costs money. Lots of money. We use links to send you in the direction of stories we think are important and we are trying hard to maintain a balance between original journalism and links.

Audio reports of interviews. There are many individuals in the various health fields that have already expressed a lot interest in being interviewed for RFW. We’d love to tape the interviews and let you hear them in their entirety. This costs money.

Documentary clips. Several of the people associated with RFW, including me, have had extensive experience in documentary making.

More columns - featuring specialists in different health areas.

A site navigation system that we have been developing that will allow you to search a vast database of knowledge, according to your PERSONAL needs. We can’t tell you much more than that for a number of reasons, but should RFW ever begin to reach some of its true goals, this next phase would enable people to use a passport/notebook to travel through information logs, via tree-branching systems, that would allow them to seek out only that information on a topic that is relevant to their needs. The goal here again is empowerment.

Thanks for reading.

NICHOLAS REGUSH