Tucson Citizen.com
Caveat Lector - Politics, Government and the Free Press – by Mark B. Evans

Why blog at TucsonCitizen.com?

by on Jun. 01, 2009, under Editor's Blog, TucsonCitizen.com

What is TucsonCitizen.com?

TucsonCitizen.com is a compendium of citizen journalism and general interest blogs that serves as The Voice of Tucson, written by Tucsonans for Tucsonans. The bloggers and citizen journalists here provide news, information, opinion, commentary and perspective on the issues, interests and events that affect daily life in the Old Pueblo. Our goal is to provide a Web site that gives voice to people who want to inform their community about issues that might not attract the attention of the daily newspaper or TV news and to provide their fellow citizens points of view about the issues and events of the day that differ from that of the dominant editorial voice in the city – the Arizona Daily Star.

(Almost) Anyone Can Have a Blog
TucsonCitizen.com is a hyper-local site, meaning the content here is written by Tucsonans for Tucsonans (term encompasses the metropolitan area, including county residents and residents of Oro Valley, Marana, Sahuarita, the Tohono O’odham Nation and the metro areas of influence, including Tubac/Rio Rico, Nogales, Benson, SaddleBrooke, Oracle/San Manuel areas). Blog authors must live in Pima or Santa Cruz counties or if they live outside of the metro area, must primarily write about Tucson/Pima county issues and topics of interest and/or Southern Arizona and Arizona issues or topics of interest (the key word here is “primarily”).

If you have a blog and are interested in what we can do for you, or you want to start a blog at TucsonCitizen.com, e-mail site Editor Mark B. Evans at mevans@tucsoncitizen.com, or call 573-4614.

Why blog here – what’s in it for you?
• Readers. Thousands of people a day come to TucsonCitizen.com. Instead of a few hundred or a few thousand page views a week, you will have the potential to generate tens or even hundreds of thousands. The reach and impact of what you write and post will exponentially increase. And isn’t that the point? If you blog because you want to inform, you will inform more people under the TucsonCitizen.com umbrella than out in the cybersphere by yourself. If you have something to say, we can deliver you an audience.

• Independence. You own what you write. Citizen journalists and bloggers at TucsonCitizen.com are independent writers and TucsonCitizen.com, Gannett and the Arizona Daily Star have no control over what they write or how often they write. Writers here need only follow a few common sense rules governing decorum and similar matters.

• Site support. All bloggers have to learn to be a bit of a web monkey to make their blogs look good. Most, however, quickly reach their Peter Principle after learning how to upload photos and video. The web is a much more powerful broadcast medium than that. We will teach you how to blog and if you already know the basics, we can help you learn advanced blogging including podcasting, vodcasting, live streaming, creating multimedia photo slideshows or interactive graphics and how to use social media to connect with readers and much more.  Your success is our success.

• Compensation potential. It is the intent of TucsonCitizen.com to return a percentage of the site’s advertising profits to its bloggers. Moreover, bloggers here will be able to sell advertising on their own blogs and keep the vast majority of the profit.

What’s in it for Gannett Co. Inc.?

• Readers. TucsonCitizen.com is a place where Tucson’s citizens can go to get information, perspective, opinion and advice that they can’t find anywhere else. We are excited about how TucsonCitizen.com gives Tucson’s citizens a voice in their government and their lifestyles.

TucsonCitizen.com site facts:

  • TucsonCitizen.com is the largest local blogging site in Tucson with more than 70 local bloggers and more than 6 million unique visitors a year who view more than 12 million pages. We’re adding new blogs and bloggers every week.
  • TC.com has excellent search engine optimization. The key to being read or seen on the internet is having your content land on the first page of search results. Our blogs are routinely in the top five of search results and often No. 1.
  • Technical support. While there are many blog sites, few to none have paid staff whose sole responsibility is to make it easy for you to blog. We provide group and one-on-one training to help your blog be the best it can be.
  • Access to the thousands of photos taken by Tucson Citizen news photographers over the past 20 years and the from the Arizona Republic and more than 80 Gannett newspapers around the country. We also have a subscription to stock photos, giving you access to tens of thousands of images to illustrate your blog without worrying about copyright infringement.
  • Access to Gannett’s nationwide content. TC.com is part of Gannett, owner of the Arizona Republic, USA Today, 85 metropolitan and suburban newspapers and 12 TV stations in some of the largest markets in the country.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 1st, 2009 at 7:27 pm and is filed under Editor's Blog, TucsonCitizen.com. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

RSS feed for this post (comments)
  • RADC MAXIMUS

    This is way too involved to post a simple comment, I suggest you open the blogs to direct comment and reply, similar to the old website, or face oblivion. Too bad. See Ya. I’ll try back later, in a week or so.

  • ppdd

    It shouldn’t be hard to post a comment – it’s running WordPress, which powers millions of blogs. If you can’t handle it, maybe you didn’t have much to say.

  • RADC MAXIMUS

    Thanks Pud- I’ll keep that in mind. I like responding DIRECTLY to fools and idiots. Thanks again.

  • ppdd

    I see the level of discourse had instantly returned to the norm.

    I assume this is the minimal setup for the site – I run the exact same software, and there is more you can do with it. I’m guessing they are just starting. There should be a registration system that will allow you to bypass the CAPTCHA.

  • RADC MAXIMUS

    Thanks pud , let’s hope so.

  • RADC MAXIMUS

    The content of this site will degrade proportionally to the access to the site. Just an observation.

  • LionelB

    If this is what it’s going to be, I will try elsewhere.

  • Mom

    Horrifying. Simply horrifying.

    By the way, the reason for the captcha is that they chose a vehicle (wordpress) that attracts the lowest of the automated spam machines. Without captcha, all you’d see is a hundred ads for Viagra, Casinos and Auto insurance.

    Not to knock wordpress. Intent is to knock the morons who decided it would be a good idea to deconstruct the TNI run site without attempting to find the talent or the money to build a professional looking site. But then again, they aren’t going to do that with the writing, so why bother with the blog?

  • RH

    I willl still visit and read, since reading is more of my forte anyway, am not hung up on ranting and raving as those on the right wing/104.1 FM fans are, since I never need any ego stroking as they do, of course they will not like having to use this format for most part but they can still tune to 104.1 FM or call into Jon Justice and get him to stroke their ego, and listen to their whining, crying about everything under the sun!

  • Bubba

    This is a gigantic failure.

  • http://thedataport.wordpress.com Art Jacobson

    I’m surprised by the tone of these comments. This is a Beta site that will be worked on for the next month and I’m willing to cut the IT guys some slack. This can be an interesting and influential site if we don’t snark it to death from the get-go

    My own preference has always been to require commenters to sign when commenting.

    Art Jacobson

  • Ado

    Hey, what happened to the old format and old articles and comments?

    This format really sucks. Where is my old avatar? What the devil are you guys trying to accomplish? This is neither user friendly nor desirable. Are you really trying your level best to drive people away? First you guys made folks not want to buy your hard copy newspaper with your support of every liberal cause that happened to dance across the news desk, now you are doing your damnedest to make your online forum irrelevant and obsolete. Want to have a look at how a newspaper runs a forum, I suggest you check out:

    http://www.mLive.com/forums

    Absent a usable format(and this sure is not), I’m not inclines to hang around here much longer. There are simply too many much better places to go on the web…

  • Ado

    “By the way, the reason for the captcha is that they chose a vehicle (wordpress) that attracts the lowest of the automated spam machines. Without captcha, all you’d see is a hundred ads for Viagra, Casinos and Auto insurance.”

    Huh? What are you talking about for goodness sake? The old format did *NOT* have spam problems. I never was bombarded with advertising that was not part of any newspaper’s normal income from ad sales. The old saying that comes to mind is:

    “IF IT AIN”T BROKE, DON”T TRY TO FIX IT.”

    • Mom

      “The old format did *NOT* have spam problems. I never was bombarded with advertising that was not part of any newspaper’s normal income from ad sales. The old saying that comes to mind is:

      “IF IT AIN”T BROKE, DON”T TRY TO FIX IT.””

      … was my point exactly. This new format (hosted by WordPress.org) is a spam magnet. I have a wordpress blog which I’ve nearly abandoned because of all of the spam you have to filter through. In order to be able to put “instant” comments on the board, you have to use captcha to foil spam machines… on formats like wordpress.

      The old format was great, but it was owned by TNI. Which the Citizen is probably not going to be a part of anymore (anyone have details?) because they are no longer print based.

      Mark Evans et al took the easy and cheap way out and put up a ready made blog template. It takes about 30 minutes and requires NO tech support (read: requires no skilled persons because it doesn’t get alot better or different than this).

      It was not only broke, it’s dead. If there is any mercy, the courts will take this experiment and crush it, forcing Gannet to sell either to someone willing to put out a real paper or someone who knows how to put out a professional looking website.

      The monkeys have taken over the asylum.

  • SizzlinSaguaro

    Ado, no, that style of forum was state of the art in 1996. It’s ugly. busy and very complicated to navigate. Not to say that this default wordpress theme has something to be desired, but accroding to here http://tucsoncitizen.com/mark-evans/2009/06/01/this-is-a-beta-site-please-be-patient/ a new site is being created.

    • Mom

      Either you, or Mark Evans, misunderstand the word Beta if you are implying that the next version will be very much different. If it is, then this is not Beta but rather a placeholder (please let that be so).

      The short explanation of a Beta site is that it’s a site that’s been released to clients for testing before its official release. It is the prototype of what is going to be released to the public. Users provide feedback, so that any issues, dislikes, suggestions can be reported to the developers and fixed.

      Which is what we’re doing.

      The implication of Beta in the header is that this WordPress theme is being tinkered with at the CSS level and the permanent site should look something like this in the end if the tinkerers are satisfied with the Beta comments.

      I say tinkerers, by the way, because this is not the world of web designers. It is the world of web hacks (not hackers, hacks). Pop a template up, tinker with widgets and voila! A fake website.

      Grumble grumble grumble…..

  • mark-evans

    This is day two of a long process to redesign the site. Creating a very basic WordPress site was the fastest way to get going. If we could have thought of a better name than “beta” we would have called it that. The new site will look nothing like this one. The home page will have a whole new look. Each blogger will have the ability to make their page look however they want. On the front end, Ryn and I are blogging and signing up bloggers, learning how to use some of the 200-plus WordPress plugins and add ons, and teaching new bloggers how to blog and use the WP features. On the backend, the IT and online guys are not only trying to debug the temporary site and build the new site, but making sure the old site still works because there are thousands of archived stories there that are still getting clicks. All the while, they still have to oversee the Tucson.com and azstarnet.com web sites.
    So, while it would be great if we could get this done in a day, it’s a large undertaking and we’re working on it as fast as we can.
    That’s why a wrote a post explaining what we’re doing and asking for patience. I’m told patience is a virtue. Give it a try.

    • Mom

      Hallelujah! Then placeholder it is, but hurry please, this is agonizing in a way that precludes enjoyable reading.

      Carry on.

  • nobubba

    I couldn’t find a “Contact Us” link so this must be the place. You have a bad Classified link in the header. Needs the extra “http//” removed. Beta on, brothers (and sisters.) Best of luck with the new project.

  • Glock&Spiel

    TC will need to step up it’s game. This won’t quite cut it I’m afraid.

  • Joel

    Hello. I see the tea-baggers in their clean white gloves and perfect smiles, the anti-downtown (I can’t get my butt off of the couch) crowd and the arts mob has found a happy home. What about the rest of Tucson? Are you going to open the gates or just keep a few voices going forever like broken records?

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  • timo

    Kuddos to tucsoncitizen.com!  I’m elated that our beloved Tucson Citizen will continue as an electronic townhall to share ideas of our unique region.  Also, thank you Gannett Corp. for keeping it alive. 
     

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  • Robert Landers

    Mr Goddard said “you deserve to lose everything to a small group of homeowners. I dom’t want a governor who believes any one should deserve to lose everything for any political reason.

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