Dear Scoop Readers And Subscribers,

On June 10th 1999 Scoop.co.nz went live out of an office in Victoria Street Wellington. Back then the Scoop team consisted of myself (Alastair Thompson) our technical director Andrew McNaughton and Ian Llewellyn.

While Ian only lasted a couple of months directly involved before getting a proper job, the rest of the founding team remains intact some 1827 days (& well over 100,000 published items, 62.2 million pages served, 278 million hits, and roughly 1.86 billion kb) later. And now we all have proper jobs!

Scoop's current on-staff team include co-editor Selwyn Manning (who joined the team back in 1999 providing stirling coverage of APEC 1999 in Auckland and launching NZ's international reputation), business development manager Wade Bishop (who joined last year and has made working for Scoop infinitely more rewarding) and our most recent addition to the team, chief reporter and Zaoui expert Kevin List.

We moved out of our office (clearly an extravagance) fairly early on and over the years we have had several staff members serve the Scoop universe out of a much photographed shed in suburban Karori, these include (in order of service) Jonathan Hill, Chris Holm, Matthew Loh, Guy MacGibbon and Greg Meylan.

Meanwhile off staff we now have enjoyed the talents of a brace or ten of columnists and correspondents writing for us regularly from every corner of the globe, plus the support of thousands of organisations posting us press releases on every subject imaginable.

On this the occasion of our 5th birthday we would like to thank all the above, plus you our readers for your support.

Thanks to you we have either won or been finalists in the hotly contested "Best News Service" popular vote net-awards for the past three years (which is as long as they have been running).

Meanwhile in the online news ratings stakes Scoop has cemented a place in the RedSheriff Netratings top 10 NZ websites overall (on the basis of number of unique users per month).

We presently enjoy the traffic of around 100,000 web surfers a week and are closing in on 400,000 readers a month. Recently, in March 2004, we also joined the relatively exclusive million+ pages served club which was something of a milestone. ( enough skiting already… ed)

Also deserving of a big ups or three (or four) are everybody else who has helped keep Scoop live and humming on the world wide wierdness these past few years.

In particular our hosting company Paradise deserves credit for providing the connection from us to you, and our advertisers, sustaining subscribers and paying NewsAgent subscribers deserve credit for providing the funds to keep us on the job.

Our online and media allies like Indymedia, Russell Brown & Public Address, BFm, Michael Rivero, the team at Buzzflash.com, Google and countless other websites and blogs deserve credit for delivering you, our readers, into our clutches.

Finally, and most important of all, we would like to thank our families who have stuck by this enterprise over the past five years, and who have provided invaluable advice encouragement and assistance. Without their support there can be no doubt whatsoever that we would have by now followed Ian into the pursuit of a proper job several eons ago.

So big ups everybody…

Kia Kaha

And here's to five (or maybe 500) more years!!!

Alastair Thompson
(For the Scoop team)

** Thanks are due to David Paine at Pead PR for reminding us of our impending birthday earlier this week.

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Deaf Ears: Speaker On Support For Mojo Mathers

Scoop Audio: In a press conference this afternoon Speaker Lockwood Smith defended his handling of requests for support for profoundly deaf MP Mojo Mathers' participation in Parliament, and said he was "deeply concerned" by the way the issue had been portrayed.

Earlier today the Greens said they had been told they would have to fund support Mathers requires out of their own budget. More>>