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

This is a beta site, please be patient

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

TucsonCitizen.com Readers:

This is a work in progress.

We could have waited weeks to go through testing and work out bugs and glitches before launching the new TucsonCitizen.com but every day we waited and were saddled with the legacy Citizen site that was built for a daily newspaper we lost momentum and readers.

So we decided to put up a bare bones site now and work on making it a well-designed, highly functional first-class web site later.

Our hope is to have the first version of the new site completely redesigned by the end of June, if not sooner. In the meantime, we will begin having about a dozen new bloggers and a few existing bloggers who are migrating over to our site begin posting as early as tomorrow. Some will begin later in the week, some next week.

We hope to have several dozen people blogging by July.

We ask your indulgence and patience while we work on the site. If you have particular problems or run into glitches trying to use the site, e-mail either Mark B. Evans, mevans@tucsoncitizen.com, or Ryn Gargulinski, rynski@tucsoncitizen.com, and we’ll have the IT team take a look at it and Ryn or me will get back to you.

Thanks,

Mark B. Evans, Editor

This entry was posted on Monday, June 1st, 2009 at 6:15 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.

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  • Mom

    Are you guys nuts? This “website” is the best case for the courts to intercede that I’ve ever seen. Not only did you choose the most god awful wordpress template to base your new “website” on, you done gone and disappeared all the talent.

    If you intend to become a news aggregator, then I’ll just move to Huffingtonpost.com, check out azstarnet.com for local news and leave you folks to the empty attic of your pipe dreams.

    If you intend to use such stellar talent as “Ryn” (OMG) to write original articles, then no thanks.

    Un-freaking-believable. Beta, Alpha, still a dumba$$ move.

  • Happy

    Mark,

    It’s true, I know you’re in beta, but the basic WordPress blog is disappointing. I’ll be checking back over the next few weeks to see how things progress. Looking forward to the new Tucson Citizen, but hoping it’s more appealing. If you need help with WP, holla.

  • sunshinesuperman

    Well at least we know that Mom is not always right, nor it touch with things in progress.

  • sunshinesuperman

    Well at least we know that Mom is not always right, nor in touch with things in progress.

  • Mom

    Interesting how many comments from the last several days have been deleted by the Ryn-master. Not just mine either…

    • http://www.ryngargulinski.com Rynski

      ???
      dearest mom,

      i have not deleted any comments.

      ryn.

    • http://www.ryngargulinski.com Rynski

      where did you leave the comments (on which postings?) so we can track down what is happening to them.

  • Mom

    Let’s see what happens to this one:

    Even your bloggers are questioning your ability to do your job. Excerpt from the Data Port’s Art Jacobson (who doesn’t get the idea of fair use of excerpts in editorializing apparently, despite his description of himself as a freelance journalist) – Data Port if you’re not paying attention has been assimilated into the Citizen continuum:

    “In a recent post Mark Evans introduced a daily feature, his Top Ten News Digs…ten stories he thinks are particularly interesting and his comments on the stories….. (this is me, Mom, editing for space and to make sure my point of view comes through during the fair use of this excerpt)……. (back to Art’s post now)…… Now here’s my question: Did TucsonCitizen.com pay anyone for the stories he linked to? Seven of the links were to papers owned by Gannett: USA Today, and the Republic. Three stories were from the Arizona Daily Star. Perhaps the quotes from other Gannett papers were simply some sort of bookkeeping swap. I don’t know.

    What about the Star stories? Did the Star make a buck or two?

    And simply as a point of information I’d like to know if Gannett has a prior financial agreement with AP to link to any copyrighted AP story. ”

    Ya, and Art thinks I should be patient about the transistion? He’s ready to sic the lawyers on poor Mark. Well maybe not now that he was given a “job”. Link to the original Data Port here (before it was transformed into a wordpress site) http://thedataport.blogspot.com/

    Go ahead it’ll drive his stats up. Oh wait, he won’t know that though, cuz it’s a blogspot site. Sorry, he’s been blogging for 4 years and just found out he could track stats on wordpress… where he hasn’t taken the time to remove the canned “About” page and replace it with one of his own. His bad.

    But he did sanitize his blog before transforming it into a wordpress blog. Miraculously there is no criticism of Mr. Evans on the new blog like there was on the old one (May 25, 2009 -Ripping and Reading in Tucson). It’s a miracle I say. Art’s Blog was healed during the Rapture….

    I know, I’m getting snipey… again. Just pointing out that even the journalists on here (yes, Art seems to have a journalist’s background) don’t understand the media they’re trying to rule. In fact, like Art, many seem to dislike it (Art hates Twitter).

    Also Mark thinks it’s okay to list his “Digs”. Wow, that’s so original. And not a bit like Diggs (see Digg.com if you don’t know what I’m talking about). I’m sure there’s no way that Digg will be concerned though. Whatcha think? Let’s discuss….

  • http://web.uslawyersdb.com Joe

    I have to agree with Mom on this one. The layout and everything about the site currently is very disappointing :(

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