Local youth uses World Wide Web to write articles

Staff Writer

Brian Stelter, 14, hopes to be part of a new breed of journalists who do all their research and reporting on-line on the Internet.

The Damascus High School freshman has been creating websites since he was 9.

His first site was dedicated to the Goosebumps books.

He has since moved on to sites dedicated to his latest passion -- the Nintendo 64 game system. After working as a correspondent for the site for Nintendo Jo, a magazine devoted to the electronic game system, Stelter decided to create his own website and hopes to attract a sponsor to turn it into a money-making venture.

Earlier this month, Stelter opened the Nintendo Project website, a site dedicated to the latest news, games and analysis of Nintendo 64 and the new game system Nintendo is developing to compete with the recently released Sega Dreamcast.

"I love breaking the story and reporting on it thoroughly," Stelter said.

Stelter reads all the press releases and on-line publications about Nintendo he can find when he gets home from school. He writes short articles condensing what he's read and publishes the articles with links to the original stories.

Stelter stays at the computer monitoring information all evening, except when his brothers Kevin, 9, and Jason, 12, need to use it for homework. Neither his mother, Donna, or father, Mark, is computer-literate, Donna Stelter said.

The Nintendo Project site is averaging 1,000 visitors a day, Stelter said.

Stelter provided complete coverage for Nintendo Jo about Space World, a major game convention held in Japan last summer, and he did it without leaving his living room.

"I got up at 5 or 6 a.m. to call a guy in Japan to get news for the site. Nintendo Jo people were calling from the site and I'd take that and turn it into articles," Stelter said. "I will go all out to break Nintendo stories."

Stelter realizes that being at the convention would add to his reporting, so he is urging his mother to use family-earned free air fare to get him to the next big convention in Los Angeles in May.

Nintendo thanked Stelter for his work by sending him some games.

Stelter's journalistic idol is Matt Drudge of the Drudge Report -- the Internet newsletter that first broke last year's presidential scandal. Stelter's website is modeled on the Drudge Report.

"Matt Drudge's style -- keep it simple and straight," he said.

When Stelter is listening for a breaking story, he monitors MSNBC and CNN on a nearby television. He corresponds with MSNBC reporter Lisa Napoli, so when she needed a child expert to talk about game systems, she turned to Stelter for a recent report that aired on NBC's Dateline.

Game Fan magazine has approached Stelter about making his site the exclusive Nintendo link for the magazine.

"If I affiliate with Game Fan, they'll put banners on my site and I'll get money," he said

Stelter's interest in computers and the Internet began nine years ago when his grandfather gave the family its first computer. The family hooked up to the Internet four years ago.

"I thought it was pretty cool," Stelter said. "I got on sites to figure out how they did it. I looked at other site source code to see how they did it -- to understand the basics of how to make a web page ... Everything I need to know now to run the site, I know."

He taught himself to make images and HTML, the language used to create websites.

Last year he helped other students design a website for Baker Middle School.

"He did an excellent job ... he's a remarkable young man," said Frank Chisley, a student support specialist at Baker. "We were very fortunate to have him team up with our user support."

Stelter hopes next year to become part of the Damascus High School web page design signature program.