CRWATCH Hits Five Million Visits, Call For More Entrants

by crossriverwatch admin

www.crossriverwatch.com has surpassed the five million hits mark and the publishers are urging more Cross Riverians to step into the fray and continue to expand the frontiers of information dissemination in the state.

CrossRiverWatch was conceived in 2012 and started publication on August 27, 2012 to try and bridge the information gap between government and local communities in the state; to give a voice to these communities and enhance their capacity to mobilize and take collective action for their own well being and for strengthening the democratic process.

The CrossRiverWatch portal www.crossriverwatch.com has in the past two years, consistently kept Cross Riverians both at home and in Diaspora and indeed other Nigerians abroad abreast with happenings in the state.

Since inception, the portal has steadily garnered over 5,000,000 visits, over 31,000 fans on Facebook and 437 followers on twitter, with a peak daily visit of 42,000 and average daily visit of 15,000 readers in a state with barely 17% internet penetration.

According to the Deputy Managing Director of CRWatch Resources, Publishers of CrossRiverWatch, Mr. Charlie Ofem, “This journey is getting more and more interesting. Hitting five million visits is a milestone and a demonstration of the confidence that people have come to build in our content. It also places a huge responsibility on us to ensure at all times that the people and community’s interest and voice remains upper most.

“We are actually on course and we are achieving our goal. The main goal was to try and free up the state from the pervasive dearth of information. We have not only done that by consistently keeping our people informed, we have inspired several other Cross River focused online platforms that are also making good progress.

“We are particularly excited about the progress of calitown.com. A lot of others too that are springing up are also showing signs of a promising future. They only need proper tutelage, capacity enhancement and time to give us a fight. I maintain that the future of news is online and it is good that we are starting early to mushroom these platforms, over a few number of years they will all have been strengthened and perhaps our people will become sufficiently informed to make the right choices.

“Another interesting angle is that, we have also just successfully registered the Association of Cross River Online Journalists, ACROJ with the Corporate Affairs Commission CAC. This is a Cross River State focused union of journalists online who will pay a great deal of attention to the issues that concern the state. All these are landmarks that we were targeting and seeing them happening gives us more energy to hopefully proceed.

“We stay grateful to the good people of Cross River and friends of the State for having confidence in our content and urge them to continue to have faith in us as we strive to create a robust debate culture in our socio-polity.” He concluded.