Spokesman.com: New view on news

Today’s launch of the new Spokesman.com represents an overhaul of our online technology. Goal No. 1 in the redesign was to make the Web site cleaner and easier to use. Our top-level navigation reflects a fundamental move in that direction. Our print newspaper is organized into sections, based on geography (the Northwest) or general topic (Sports). People seek information online differently, though, so the navigation at Spokesman.com is different. You’ll have quick access to information based on not only what it’s about (Topics), but also when it happened (Times), where it happened (Places), and what kind of storytelling was used (Media). Switching among the browsing systems should be seamless. You can click on Times > Today to check out a “day page”; click on the calendar icon to find any day in our archive; toggle among media types; click on an item to view it; click on that item’s tags to see related content, and much more. No matter what you’re looking for or how you’re looking for it, we’ve made navigation – and exploration – easier.

Content tagging

The site’s new organization lets us do some pretty cool things. You can click on Today (or any date, for that matter) to see everything we’ve published on a given day, including stories, videos, photo galleries and audio clips. You’ll see “tags” on content, which let us better describe the people, places and things inside. Instead of story just being in the Sports section, you can see at a glance see that it’s about “Gonzaga basketball,” “Jeremy Pargo” and “Mark Few.” A click on a tags will take you to a page that collects everything in our site archive on that topic. And soon we’ll add geographic capabilities to Spokesman.com that will let you map the news – and see everything going on in the places you care about.

Customized profiles

Account profiles on Spokesman.com unlock a lot of features. Once you register a free user name, you can post comments on stories, videos and blogs. You’ll get a space to share contact information with other readers. You can add a list of your favorite news topics, and we’ll build a customized news feed on your profile page, filtering to the items you’re most interested in. If you add subscriber information to your profile, you’ll be able to access premium content on Spokesman.com.

Ryan Pitts

Assistant managing editor, digital media ryanp@spokesman.com