FingerLakes1
FingerLakes1, published at FingerLakes1.com, is a digital news outlet and regional portal based in Seneca Falls, New York, covering local news, weather and sports across the Finger Lakes region. Founded in 1998 by Jim Sinicropi, it has grown from a small web-services business helping local proprietors get online into what it describes as the region's first and only internet broadcasting network, streaming live programming, publishing a daily news report and covering communities across a multi-county region from its base at 12 North Park Street in Seneca Falls. Its slogan captures the ambition: the life of the Finger Lakes, delivered around the clock on every device.
The outlet covers the corridor of towns and small cities that ring the northern Finger Lakes — Geneva, Canandaigua, Auburn, Penn Yan, Waterloo, Newark, Palmyra, Lyons, Ithaca, Skaneateles, Watkins Glen and many smaller communities — across counties including Seneca, Ontario, Wayne, Yates, Cayuga and Schuyler. For a largely rural region served by shrinking newspaper staffs, FingerLakes1 built an alternative model early: a privately owned digital company that pairs a news and sports operation with the web development, hosting and marketing business that originally sustained it.
Founded in 1998 as a web business
FingerLakes1.com was established in 1998 by owner Jim Sinicropi. It started, according to the Seneca County Chamber of Commerce, as a contract business to help small proprietors establish a marketing presence on the emerging World Wide Web. In those early days Sinicropi relied on self-taught expertise and helpful tips from technical online forums to custom-build websites for novice clients and end users. As word of mouth spread about the company's capabilities and affordable services, the growing customer list soon demanded that he leave his day job to pursue the business full-time.
Eager to help more businesses in his hometown of Seneca Falls, Sinicropi recruited staff, and the business grew to five full-time employees with expertise in programming, hosting and graphic design. Its customer base remained focused on the immediate Finger Lakes corridor from Geneva to Seneca Falls. Sinicropi, a Syracuse University alumnus and avid fan of the Orange, then used the same platform to create something the region did not have: a news and entertainment portal for the local community, published under the same name.
From web design to a news portal
The news side of FingerLakes1.com grew into a substantial operation in its own right. By 2017, its news website was attracting an average of 32,000 unique visitors per week. Its regular podcasts and video programming offered viewers everything from political analysis to high school sports coverage; in 2016 the team televised 38 high school basketball games, including wire-to-wire coverage of eventual sectional champions the Wayne Eagles, Mynderse Blue Devils and South Seneca Falcons, and livestreamed a debate in the race for the 54th State Senate seat.
That combination of civic and sporting coverage earned formal recognition. In 2017 the Seneca County Chamber of Commerce and Sessler Companies presented FingerLakes1.com with the Chamber's Small Business of the Year Award, chosen from five finalists at the Chamber's annual membership event. State Senator Pam Helming, on behalf of herself and Assemblymen Brian Kolb and Phil Palmesano, presented Sinicropi with a New York State joint proclamation honouring the award, describing the company as a one-stop digital marketing shop that had, for more than a decade, helped businesses and communities deliver information and content throughout the region. The Chamber's president called it a great example of the positive contributions small businesses make to the local community.
News, weather and the daily report
Today the site's newsroom covers the daily life of the region in depth: county and town government, including Seneca Falls town board budget disputes and landfill questions; policing and courts, from sheriff's office activity to arrests and investigations; schools; road crashes and closures; and state policy as it lands locally. A daily digest, "Get Local," published through its newsletter channel, rounds up the day's biggest Finger Lakes stories in numbered briefs, while the FL1 Weather Center supplies regional forecasts — a service of particular weight in a lake-effect snow region where conditions can change quickly between the lakes.
Severe weather coverage illustrates the model: when a destructive, tornado-warned storm tore through Seneca Falls and Waterloo in September 2026, bringing a measured 76-mile-per-hour wind gust, widespread tree and utility damage, flooded roads and thousands of power outages, FingerLakes1 published running updates with official advisories, outage figures and safety guidance for residents. The outlet maintains a live 24/7 stream and distributes video across YouTube and social platforms, including dedicated sports and food accounts, alongside its main news presence on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok.
Sports and live broadcasting
Sports is the second pillar of the brand, under the FL1 Sports banner. The company's live-streaming of high school basketball and other local sports made it a fixture for families and alumni across the region, and its broadcasting extended to professional baseball: the Auburn Doubledays, then the Single-A short-season affiliate of the Washington Nationals, renewed their broadcast partnership with FingerLakes1.com for the 2019 season, streaming all 38 home games plus select road contests, with pre- and post-game shows, on the site and through the FL1 Radio feature of its mobile apps. Sinicropi, as president of FingerLakes1.com, Inc., said the company was thrilled to keep bringing live Doubledays baseball to the region.
The company describes its streaming operation as the Finger Lakes region's first and only internet broadcasting network, with more than ten hours of live content weekly through FingerLakes1.TV, including programmes such as Finger Lakes Today. That live infrastructure — built by a web company rather than a television station — is what allowed a five-person Seneca Falls business to out-produce larger outlets on the stories its audience cares about most.
A regional portal, not just a news site
True to its origins, FingerLakes1 remains a portal as well as a newsroom, with business listings, entertainment and community information layered around the journalism, and local advertising giving Finger Lakes businesses a route to the region's audience. Its podcasts span news, sports and community topics, and its opinion and editorial space gives community members a place to share views on local issues. The address is unchanged from its growth years — 12 North Park Street in Seneca Falls — and its coverage map still follows the lakes.
More than a quarter-century after its founding, FingerLakes1 stands as an early and durable example of rural digital media built from the technology side: a web-design shop that taught itself to build websites for neighbours, then built the region a newsroom of its own, and kept expanding it — from text to podcasts, from podcasts to live video, and from Seneca Falls to the whole Finger Lakes.
Ownership and structure
FingerLakes1.com is a privately owned company, held by its founder Jim Sinicropi through FingerLakes1.com, Inc., and based in Seneca Falls. Its structure is unusual among local news outlets because the journalism sits inside a broader digital services business: the same company that reports the news also builds and hosts websites, provides programming and graphic design, and offers local businesses marketing and advertising access to its audience. That dual structure financed the newsroom's growth in its early years, when its team reached five full-time staff with expertise in programming, hosting and graphic design.
The arrangement also shaped the product. Because the company's skills were technical before they were editorial, FingerLakes1 moved early into the formats that defined digital local media — streaming audio and video, mobile apps with an FL1 Radio feature, podcasts, newsletters and social channels for news, sports and food — rather than treating them as additions to a print product that never existed.
Coverage area in detail
The region FingerLakes1 covers is defined by the lakes themselves and the communities around their northern shores. Its live-stream descriptions list Geneva, Canandaigua, Auburn, Penn Yan, Seneca Falls, Waterloo, Newark, Palmyra, Lyons, Ithaca, Skaneateles, Watkins Glen, Naples, Macedon, Gorham, Walworth, Honeoye, Union Springs, Sodus, Ovid, Trumansburg, Rushville and Montour Falls among its communities, spanning Seneca, Ontario, Wayne, Yates, Cayuga and Schuyler counties. No single newspaper in the region covers all of that ground daily, which is precisely the gap the portal was built to fill when its founder expanded it from a Geneva-to-Seneca Falls web business into a regional news service.
Within that footprint its daily reporting follows the institutions residents share: county sheriffs and village police, town and village boards, school districts, courts, fire and rescue services such as Mercy Flight Central, and the state decisions — on landfills, budgets and infrastructure — that shape small-town life across the lakes.
Recognition and significance
The 2017 Small Business of the Year Award from the Seneca County Chamber of Commerce, and the accompanying New York State joint proclamation presented by Senator Pam Helming with Assemblymen Brian Kolb and Phil Palmesano, recognised both halves of the company: a digital marketing shop serving local business, and a news and entertainment portal serving the public. Chamber members and guests numbering more than 280 attended the presentation, at an event sponsored by del Lago Resort and Casino.
The award citation captured why the outlet matters to its region: for more than a decade by that point, FingerLakes1.com had helped businesses and communities deliver valuable information and content to customers, businesses and organisations throughout the Finger Lakes. Founded three years before Google, in the first wave of the commercial web, it has outlasted most of the newspapers it once competed with for local attention — by being, from the start, a creature of the internet rather than a print brand adapting to it.
