Text of the press release I sent out yesterday to area media about the new design:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

TUCSON – Monday morning, July 6th, the new TucsonCitizen.com will launch its redesigned Web site as a home for Tucson’s citizen journalists. A compendium of blogs, it will serve as The Voice of Tucson, written by Tucsonans for Tucsonans. They will provide news, information, opinion, commentary and perspective on the issues, interests and events that affect daily life in the Old Pueblo. (continue reading…)

The new version of the TucsonCitizen.com will be up Monday morning.

The redesigned site will have improved home page content and navigation and much improved individual blog pages.

Each blogger will be able to customize their blog and add features and functions available to WordPress blogs.

This version of the site is the ground floor of what we hope to be a very tall building of citizen journalist bloggers adding information and perspective about life in Tucson.

Be sure to check back Monday for the new and improved TucsonCitizen.com.

For more information about TucsonCitizen.com and our mission, go here and here.

I can’t believe it’s only Wednesday. After a fitfull start Monday, the basic site is up and several new bloggers are blogging.

Technical issues continue to be debugged and the site should get better every day. The problem with commenting logins will continue for a few more days, though.

Some of the Wordpress plugins are buggy and we’re working those out too. The blogs should start to get more sophisticated and unique as the users get used to WP (including the administrators who are learning WP at a furious pace).

Among the new bloggers signed up are:

From the Right – by John Ellinwood, a conservative and frequent blogger who is the former president of the Oro Valley Republican Club. He’ll be writing about local, state and national politics.

Data Port – by Art Jacobson, a retired writer and journalist who will write mostly about politics and the media. But he’s been blogging Data Port for a couple of years and judging by his archive, he’s likely to write about anything.

Veteran Veritas – by Mike Brewer, a former Marine and Vietnam veteran who has been involved in veterans’ issues for 30 years. He’s also a downtown gadfly and I’m trying to get him to write about that, too, but his real expertise is veterans’ affairs.

Tucson Sci-Fi – by Pablo Bey. He’s a little hard to describe. Click on his blog and read his bio info. He’ll mostly write about science fiction and horror media, but he’s an eclectic guy and it’s likely his blog will be too.

The Logical Lizard – by Geoff Notkin,  “a science writer and columnist, a television documentary host, meteorite hunter, photographer, musician and artist.” He will be writing about all those topics.

Fashion Edge – by staff of the Razor’s Edge, a clothing store for people with… um … an edgy taste in clothing. Check out the blog. It’s either your scene or it isn’t. If it is, it should be a fun blog.

Artistic Tucson – will be written by a numerous Tucson artists about the Tucson art scene and art in general.

Metromix – Polly Higgins is a Citizen staffer still awaiting news of her fate who has been the head of Metromix for the past year. She will blog about events and entertainment options in Tucson that can be found in Metromix.

Zoom Zoom Tuson – Keith Ames will blog about Tucson’s racing scene.

There are numerous other blogs in the works about numerous issues that should start up during the rest of this week and next.

I know some readers have been frustrated with the change but the site should get better every day. Roll out of the full redesigned site is still on schedule for the end of the month, if not sooner.

What is TucsonCitizen.com?
The site is a collection of blogs and bloggers who post news, information, opinion and more on the site
everyday. Blogs will range from politics to UA sports, and from knitting to star gazing.

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.

• Marketing. Most blogs stand alone in the cybersphere, employing various means to attract attention, most usually relying on Google keyword searches, RSS feeds and word-of-mouth. TucsonCitizen.com will market the site to Tucson using one of the most powerful marketing tools in the city – Tucson Newspapers – providing exposure that few bloggers can afford on their own.

• 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 can help you podcast, vodcast, live stream newsmaker interviews, create multimedia photo slideshows, create interactive graphics, find and use government data and much more. If you have a cool idea for your blog, we can help you get it on your page.

• Compensation potential. It is the intent of TucsonCitizen.com to return a percentage of the site’s advertising profits to its bloggers. Details on how and when that will occur will be available soon.

What’s in it for Gannett and Tucson Newspapers?

• Readers. TucsonCitizen.com will be 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 the potential the new TucsonCitizen. com has in giving Tucson’s citizens a voice in their government and their lifestyles. If you have something to say, we can deliver you an audience.

If you have a blog and are interested in what we can do for you, or you want to start a blog for TucsonCitizen.com, e-mail site Editor Mark B. Evans at mevans@tucsoncitizen.com, or call 573-4561.

Today marks a new era for Arizona’s oldest newspaper.

Started in 1870 as a weekly newspaper by John Wasson, the then Arizona Citizen was a Republican counter voice to the Democratic Arizonian weekly newspaper. Just five years after the Civil War, passions still ran high and the conflict of North and South had morphed into a political battle of Republicans and Democrats.

Wasson’s writing style was more akin to today’s blogging than to objective journalism. His stories reflected his political point of view, contained his own personal observations and were laced with opinion that today would be called “editorializing.”

But the paper persevered and grew, eventually dropping the personal views of its writers and becoming Tucson’s leading daily for much of its existence until about the 1970s when readers began to choose a morning paper more frequently than the afternoon Citizen. Circulation declined and in January, the Citizen’s corporate owner, Gannett Co. Inc., decided to cease printing the Citizen.

After months of negotiations with prospective buyers and the U.S. Department of Justice, which had an amount of regulatory oversight of the Citizen’s operating agreement with the Arizona Daily Star, Gannett on May 16 decided to cease printing a newspaper but continue the Citizen’s Web site as a home for opinion and commentary.

So now the Citizen has come full circle, returning in a fashion to the personal journalism of its founder. This new site will serve as The Voice of Tucson, providing a forum for Tucson-area residents to express their views on the issues of the day.

It’s a brave new world and myself and Ryn Gargulinski, who have been chosen to oversee this new version of the Citizen, will work hard to make sure it plays a relevant role in providing perspective and understanding on matters that affect people’s lives.

The site will be more than just debates over politics and government, but advice and discussion on all manner of things affecting the lives of our neighbors. It will have information on the arts, science, Veterans’ affairs, health and more.

In the end, it is our hope that you find the site useful, in one manner or another. If not, let us know and we’ll work to change it.

If you have a blog, or have a good idea for a blog, and want to blog at TucsonCitizen.com, contact either me, mevans@tucsoncitizen.com, or Ryn, rynski@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