The American Reporter was the first online-only newspaper to use content that was specifically written for the web, rather than items fed from a news wire.
The paper has no political, corporate or other affiliation, but was founded to give journalists around the world an opportunity to have a financial stake in their own work.
The paper was honored by the ACLU in 2000 with an Upton Sinclair Freedom of Expression Award ("Uppie") for its groundbreaking First Amendment victory in the Shea v. Reno U.S. Supreme Court case, in which Internet censorship was ruled unconstitutional.
Joe Shea won the Los Angeles Press Club award for the Best Internet News Story in 2000 for an article that led to the arrest of eight people to jail on charges of fraud in a multimillion-dollar "pyramid" scam.
[citation needed] AR Chief of Correspondents Randolph Holhut won the Vermont Press Association's first place award for editorial writing in 2007.