As an editor of one of Gatehouse Media’s network of newspapers I spent last Tuesday afternoon at a corporate strategy-sharing meeting in Hutchinson. Unfortunately somebody at the meeting or on the way to, shared a nice little flu bug with me and the next several days were mostly a fog.
I do remember something about changes.
Gatehouse is revamping the look of all the websites in our corporation and sjnewsonline.com will be reflecting these changes beginning today.
Our site will take on a different look with a redesigned homepage. The page will no longer have a line of stories as it has in the past. Instead it will have one featured story, one highlighted story and “buckets.”
No, not the kind of buckets you are probably thinking about, but content buckets. News Now, and Top Stories will be highlighted in small sections called buckets. They will tease full stories posted elsewhere on the site and clicking on the story lead in the bucket will take you to that article.
The news in the buckets is supposed to roll over regularly with new story content each day. Not sure where we will get the new story content each day since thankfully in our small communities some days the biggest news story is my big white dog escaping down Main Street, but we will come up with something.
One of the ways Gatehouse would like us to fill these buckets is with more reader generated stories and contributions. That’s where you, the readers, come in. We would like more content from our readers. Photos, stories, informational information are all items we will be trying to get readers to contribute to the site and the printed pages.
In the near future we will be posting callouts in the paper and on the web for different types of content we would like readers to send our way. And of course you will still be able to post your own comments on stories we have already published on the site. We haven’t been getting a lot of comments on stories yet, but I’ve enjoyed reading the ones we do get.
Special thanks to Barry Ragan and Trish Coleman for keeping the News going while I was busy trying to fill my own bucket.
Terry Spradley is the editor of the St. John News. His e-mail address is sjnewseditor@embarqmail.com
St. John, Kan. —
