TucsonCitizen.com has an immediate opening for a social media editor to develop, implement and oversee an aggressive social media strategy to help grow TucsonCitizen.com’s audience and to train a cadre of citizen journalists and bloggers on the use of social media. Secondary duties will include recruiting and training new citizen journalists and bloggers, writing a blog about social media trends and uses, and assisting in the site’s overall marketing and audience development strategy.

Position is part-time, 20 hours per week with flexible work hours and competitive pay.

Qualifying candidates should have:
• A background in the institutional use (not necessarily personal use) of existing social media, including Facebook and Twitter, and knowledge of emerging social media programs;
• Intermediate technical background in software programs used to create varied online content;
• Intermediate abilities in web programming;
• Intermediate to advanced photography skills and intermediate videgoraphy and video editing abilities;
• A background in journalism or news publishing
• Strong writing and editing skills
• Strong social skills

To apply, send a one-page cover letter, resumé and samples of your work or links to your work that you think demonstrates any or all of the above to Mark B. Evans, Editor/Administrator TucsonCitizen.com, mevans@tucsoncitizen.com.

Anthony Gimino, respected, award-winning sports journalist, hired by TucsonCitizen.com to head-up sports blogging network

Anthony Gimino

TUCSON – Anthony Gimino has been hired by TucsonCitizen.com to oversee the site’s growing sports blogging network and to assist in the overall administration of the citizen journalism and community blogging website.

Gimino has been administering the sports network since September 2009 through a grant from American University’s J-Lab project. The grant funding expires in December and Gimino will become a full-time employee of TucsonCitizen.com Jan. 3.

Gimino has 20 years experience as a sports reporter in Arizona including eight years at the Arizona Daily Star and four years at the Tucson Citizen. He was the Citizen’s sports columnist when the print version of the Citizen ceased in 2009 but returned to write for the new TucsonCitizen.com a few months later through the J-Lab grant.

Also in January, TucsonCitizen.com will hire a part-time social media editor to help with the site’s social media efforts and to grow TucsonCitizen.com’s audience.

Social media is becoming as important for news and information websites as search engines in connecting readers to content they want to read.

The social media position became necessary due to the rise in prominence of social sites and the increasing audience of TucsonCitizen.com.

In October and December, more people visited TucsonCitizen.com than had been visiting the newspaper’s website in 2008 and 2009 before end of the print version in May 2009. TucsonCitizen.com had more than 430,000 unique visitors in October and more than 520,000 unique visitors and just shy of 1 million page views in November. The newspaper version of the Tucson Citizen averaged about 400,000 unique visitors a month in 2008 and 2009 through May.

Gimino replaces Ryn Gargulinski who had been a reporter for the Tucson Citizen from January 2007 to May 2009 and a site administrator and blogger for TucsonCitizen.com from May 2009 until she resigned last week.

TucsonCitizen.com, a publication of Gannett Co, Inc., is a compendium of blogs that serves as The Voice of Tucson, written by Tucsonans for Tucsonans. The site’s 65 bloggers and citizen journalists provide news, information, opinion, commentary and perspective on the issues, interests and events that affect daily life in the Old Pueblo

We have been experiencing stability problems with our server since upgrading to WordPress 3.0 two weeks ago. In other words, the site keeps crashing every other day or so.

We’re scratching our heads trying to figure out why, but in the meantime, one of the smart programming dudes has written a program that will restart our server software, or failing that, the server automatically.

It takes a few minutes for the program to make sure the server is really down, then a few more minutes to restart the program.

So if you’re a regular visitor to TC.com and the site doesn’t load on occasion, wait a few minutes and try again, it should be back up by then.

We should have the problem solved in the next few days. Thanks for your patience.

We added a new feature to the site today, CrimeReports.com. The widget is at the bottom of the home page and maps crime reports submitted to the company by the Pima County Sheriff’s Office and the Tucson, Oro Valley, Marana, Sahuarita and Tohono O’odham police departments.

The database is searchable by address, by crime type and by age – three days, one week, two weeks or one month.

You can use this data simply for curiosity – find out what’s going on in your neighborhood. But it can be a useful tool for home buyers, Realtors, people thinking about switching apartments, especially UA students, Neighborhood Watch committees, home owners associations and anyone who needs reminding to keep their cars and homes locked.

Check it out and let us know what you think.

The TC.com web server crashed this morning about 9 a.m. taking the website down with it.

If you’re reading this, you know it’s working now.

Sorry about that.

The new look of TucsonCitizen.com launched yesterday and there have been a few bugs needing stomping. But some readers have reported that the site looks “exploded” or “jumbled” with part of the old site design and the new site design all mixed together.

Most of those reporting the problem were using Mozilla/Firefox as their browser. The problem lies with the browser cache. To fix it, Mozilla/Firefox users need to reset their cache.

Here’s a link to a site that explains how to reset the cache on various browsers. Or for Firefox instructions, you can click here.

A new version of TucsonCitizen.com launched today with more content and a more reader-friendly design.

There are more than 50 bloggers and citizen journalists writing for TucsonCitizen.com whose goal is 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 different points of view about the issues of the day that differ from that of the dominant editorial voice in the city – the Arizona Daily Star.

In the year since the Tucson Citizen ceased publication as a daily newspaper and became a site for citizen journalism and community blogging, TucsonCitizen.com has had more than 3 million unique visitors who have viewed more than 6.5 million pages of news and information.

Those numbers will only grow larger with today’s changes as there is now even more content to read at TucsonCitizen.com, including news from the largest news provider in the country, Gannett Co. Inc., owner of TucsonCitizen.com

In addition to timely postings from TucsonCitizen.com’s ever-growing corps of citizen journalists and bloggers, TucsonCitizen.com will now feature up-to-the-minute postings of breaking news, features, sports and financial and business news from some of the largest papers in the country, including the Arizona Republic and USA Today.

We’re adding new bloggers and citizen journalists every week. If you would like to write for TucsonCitizen.com, contact Editor Mark B. Evans at mevans@tucsoncitizen.com.

The changes you see on our site today are just the beginning, more are still to come, including:

• A new sports page that will include all of the news and commentary from the TC Sports Network, but also sports news feeds from the Arizona Republic and USA Today. The TC Sports Network features sports journalism from several freelance sports journalists and from other sports web sites who have joined the network as a partner. More network partners will be added in the coming months which will make the TC Sports Network Page one of the most comprehensive collections of Arizona sports news – youth, high school, college and pro – in the state.
• A searchable, user-generated calendar featuring all there is to do and see in the greater Tucson area.
• Tucson In Pictures, a reader-generated photo site of life in the Old Pueblo.

Give the new site a look and tell us what you think in the comments section below or you can e-mail Mark B. Evans at the link above.