They retreat, we charge ahead

Just when most media types are running and screaming away from investing in new dot-coms, and the daily paper is reducing its page size, the News and Review is taking a counterintuitive approach, of course, by launching a new and expanded Web site with more pages. Are we crazy?

We don’t think so, because more people are accessing journalism on the Web and we see this new, improved site as a fresh distribution point for the newspaper. Although we’d love to make back our investment, the potential to make more money was not the reason to launch www.newsreview.com. Our goal is to increase interactivity with the readers and get our words out to a wider group of people. The recent balloting for the 10th anniversary of the SAMMIES was an indication that our readers respond to the Internet version of the paper.

The approach of our designers has been straightforward, and that is to present all of our editorial content online in what we hope is a visually appealing way. And there’ll be some extra content on the Web page that we can’t fit into the paper. In music coverage alone we’ll have an expanded club calendar, band bios, photos and hundreds of local MP3s in the already popular Sceneandheard section. In addition, an easy to navigate search archive can pull up stories from the past six months. If you are interested in stories by a particular writer, they’ll be there to pull up on the Authors Page.

It’s no easy feat to launch one of these, yet our staff is busy not just getting the bugs out, but already looking to add even more content in the future. We’ll soon see our sister publications in Chico and Reno also coming on board.

Jump on and think of it as one more place to pick up the paper.