For the past several months our staff at The GoTriCities Network and Kingsport Times-News have been submerged in a world of creativity and innovation. Our small, innovative group has worked through many ideas and renderings to develop a distinct and unique website resource that places value on our published content and create a brand new audience and user experience in the Tri-Cities.
Some time ago, we began to re-imagine the what our newspaper’s website was to become. In 1998, we were one of the first newspapers to go online and in 2001, we made a major switch to our own software. Since the, we produced lots of local contact and built a large audience, but studies clearly suggest this has come at the expense of the printed edition. Our online newspaper site was being read by…newspaper readers. Not hard to understand why either…
Why pay for something you can get free on your desktop? Newspapers around the world are making battle plans for the future as the Internet continues to erode distribution channels across scores of media, entertainment and consumer products.
In the wake of Web 2.0, RSS, Blogs, Broadband and challenges to the newspaper’s core product, we wanted to do something different. As we explored the world for intriguing website concepts it quickly became clear that everyone was presenting pretty much the same thing – reproducing their valuable news-print content online, offering this information for free with the hopes that online advertising would pay the way.
Advertising online continues to grow, but one of the critical assessments struck a chord with me and that was the notion to create a brand new audience online and on Friday, May 5th, The Kingsport Times-News launched Times-News Online 3.0.
Not only did our staff turn the dinosaur, but our core staff of two programmers, two designers have built something unique and it’s about time to present it on the blog. In addition to the creation of several new publishing attributes, we rewrote the entire core software and launched the new site on two-T1s and a highly sophisticated meta data controler that supports mirrored raid servers and equipped with no single point of failure.
It wasn’t easy either as the past three months of my life have been bombarded with covert hatemail about this or that – the obits, the $2.99/$5.99 per subscription price (a happy meal a month). Nevertheless, we’re still focused on the future and lots of new services to offer our new subscribers.
David Cate – Design and Overall Architecture
Eric Miller – Programming and Architecture
Sam McConnell – Programming
Jacob Cain – CSS Programming
Publisher – Keith Wilson
Don Fenley – New Media Editor
Ted Como – Editor in Cheif
Danny Strickler – Systems Manager
Jeff Rogers – Systems Manager and Server Architecture
Brent Robinson – Server Management
Here’s the full story as published on the new Times-News Blog.
Welcome to the new Times-News Blog2006-07-13 11:45:35
The staff at the Times-News Online is working hard to present a unique community resource with the launch of the third revision of our newspaper website.
This evolution of our website brings about many changes and although it’s still rough around the edges, our staff is still working with your suggestions to produce something new and distinctly different than the daily newspaper.
The Kingsport Times-News is a valuable resource for the most comprehensive and in-depth media publication in Northeast Tennessee and is delivered to the doorsteps of over 40,000 homes daily. Recently, we enhanced the daily newspaper by offering a new e-edition that presents, every page, every day right on your personal computer. Offered to our subscribers at a substantial savings from the print edition, this is the ultimate newspaper resource in Kingsport and surrounding communities.
The Times-News Online, version 3.0 was developed to create something uniquely different from other online newspapers. Our subscribers support our abilities to deliver this product and although we launched one of the first online newspapers in the region, we wanted to create something new from the online edition by enhancing with more than ever before.
Our team of publishing experts, designers, programmers and IT staff has developed Times-News 3.0 with many new interesting features and this blog is one of many improvements. This is where we will introduce new features, communicate with our audience and share each others ideas. I will be joined regularly by Don Fenley, Times-News Online new media editor and other members of our staff as we continue to work together to culture this innovative Internet resource unlike any other in the Mountain Empire.
Times-News Together. That’s our mission as we go forward. In addition to offering more breaking news than ever before from the Associated Press, the Times-News is offering you a chance to tell your story, show off your creativity.
The print edition has a limited amount of space, but very citizen and business owner has a unique story to tell and many times, some of these stories are never published for the sake of space and other publishing decisions. That’s not so with Times-News Online 3.0.
We invite you to explore these personal publishing features that give you a new medium for communicating your news and information. Click here and create a new profile . From there you will have several publishing tools to create, comment, publish and interact on our new website. Included with this membership is a complete set of easy-to-read tutorials so you can explore the depth of this new website resource.
Feel free to publish your neighborhood news, an open house, a band appearance, t-ball scores, reunions and even creative writing and poetry. It’s truly yours and if you’re a star user, you can publish at any time.
In addition to your new publishing tools, Times-News Online presents more breaking news. Each day, we’ll feature the top stories in the region, death notices and all of the breaking news from the Associated Press. This website will be changing many times throughout the day.
Subscribe to email and RSS services to help you keep in touch with the news even more. The Daily Brief is back online and is a free service that delivers headlines, death notices and more right to your desktop. If you are tech-savvy and understand RSS feeds, you have even more resources with feeds from all of our popular news categories. Click here to learn more about The Daily Brief or RSS Feeds .
Wait till you see our new photo features . Since 1998, The Times-News Online and GoTriCities Network have archived over 4,500 photos the chronicle life in Northeast Tennessee and Southwest Virginia. With the new website, we now welcome your photos and when you establish a new profile, you can upload as many photos as you like. We update and feature these photos throughout the newspaper website from all of our new web partners who are working together with us and you never know what you’ll see. Vote on your favorite photos and participate in regular photo contests at this fun new feature which also features new keyword searches and category albums.
There are many new ideas and revisions added often to the new Times-News Online and over the next several months, we will continue to present new features here on the staff blog index . This new feature presents several community bloggers who are posting regular contributions that represent their passion or profession. If you have a blog, you can add yours to the blog roll and we feature new content from the community via Citizen Blogs .
We appreciate your attention and we look forward to your ideas and suggestions as we continue to work together on this new website. Thank you for your patience too. Building a new idea from scratch like this with local programmers is a challenge and as much as we would like to be perfect, sometimes we’ll miss the mark, but with your help and feedback, we hope to create something brand new and unique just like the place we call home and share our news, experiences and more from this new resource.
So welcome. We invite you to read the welcome from publisher Keith Wilson and create a new profile. Then explore some of the tutorials and join with us as we continue to create your new personal media center – Times-News 3.0 Together.
David Cate
New Media Director
The Times-News Online
http://www.timesnews.net
http://www.gotricities.net