Welcome to Kalamazoo News Monitor

Kalamazoo News Monitor (KNM) is a daily web publication covering news, information, and resources that are directly relevant to people who live in Kalamazoo, Michigan. 

You will immediately notice that KNM is an unusual news website. Instead of writing and publishing our own content, we are a convenient homepage that provides previews of and links to Kalamazoo stories published on other websites. The "read more" button of each story identifies the website you'll be clicking through to. 

January 21-27 is KNM's soft launch. While we work out remaining bugs, we invite you to explore the site, share it with others, and share your thoughts with KNM via Twitter or our contact page.

KNM presents content in much the same way as Facebook and Twitter – previewing the words and photos of the stories we link to, so that we can promote those stories to our followers. We chose a newspaper-style website as our sharing platform, so that everyone can access KNM with ease, and so that stories can be organized, rather than just piling up and/or quickly disappearing from view.

We hope that publishers will welcome KNM as a sharing channel that sends more people to their websites every day and results in more people sharing those stories on their own social media channels. We'd like to be a rising tide that lifts all ships. KNM generates no revenue, so we are not competing with anyone. 

KNM is not a breaking news outlet. The front page is updated daily, and additional stories regularly appear in the various sections listed in the site menu. Our target audience is people who don't want to miss Kalamazoo-relevant news, and who also don't want to search for it every day – or depend exclusively on social media to show it to them. If you visit KNM once a day or once a week, the recent Kalamazoo news will be waiting for you.

In addition to providing more traffic to specific articles on other websites, we hope that KNM will introduce many readers to online news and information sites they weren't previously aware of. These sites are all full of valuable content that falls outside of KNM's narrow, Kalamazoo-centric focus – so we are just scratching the surface of what they have to offer. Kalamazoo and Southwest Michigan are lucky to have so many sources of information. That's why a publication like KNM makes sense for our community. 

There is no comment section on KNM, but we’re following public comments on twitter @news_kalamazoo. Private communications can be sent via twitter messages or our contact page. Drive KNM around the block and let us – and others – know what you think. This is an experiment. Everyone is invited.

John Hilgart, Editor