There have been some changes here at The Reporter that will hopefully make the online experience much better for our readers.
First you may notice the pages load much, much faster. All the Philadelphia area newspapers in our group have moved over to the Zwire web servers. Zwire, owned by a company called Town News, operates web sites for hundreds of newspapers across the country. This means they're GOOD at it, with lots of server capacity and robust software.
They did not design The Reporter's site, nor do they provide content (we do!). Their job is simply to make sure the right data gets into the right slots and is accessible for our readers 24/7.
The other big change is the addition of a search function. Our readers have been asking (even begging) for this for the past couple of years, and now it's back.
More changes are planned, including a site re-design, in the upcoming months. The web site has become, for some readers, their primary source for local news. And while our site can serve as just an electronic version of the print product, it needs to be much more than that.
There is much hand-wringing in the newspaper industry over what will happen to journalism as the public migrates to new sources for their news. Ask a dozen 'experts' and you will probably get a dozen widely-varying opinions as to what a successful local news operation will look like in twenty years.
But for all the dark clouds hanging over every newsroom in the country, there is plenty of light on the horizon for those who can see it. I don't know what The Reporter, The Inquirer, Channel 6 or the New York Times will look like in twenty years. But I do know that if we are to stay vital to our community and readers, we have no choice but to keep looking toward that horizon and find new ways to reach out.
Have a great summer!