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FROM THE EDITOR

Posted on April 8, 2010 by Staff

The now old joke goes like this: There are 10 kinds of people in this world — those who understand binary and those who don’t.

I love living in a town brimming with geeks and gadgeteers. The Heathkit catalog was a treasured childhood read. And as the son of an engineer, I got pretty comfortable being around the machines from CRTs to power-plant turbines.

Things change, and, if you’ve been paying attention for, say, the last 50 years, a lot of that has been driven by the increasingly expedited mining and dissemination of information.

At one point in 1969, Dad’s office was in a room with dozens of two-inch tape machines the size of refrigerators all lined up and tied into a giant processor, which printed stuff out on a Teletype.

A couple of decades later, when we both had PCs, he would say, “That computer on your desk has more power than that whole room did.” Now he says my phone is way more powerful.

The news industry has had a rapid transition as Moore’s Law kicked in. Although I’m still not convinced that the transition to offset printing is not the biggest change in newspapers in the past 100 years, figuring out the relationship of web and print has certainly been the greatest cause of consternation.

One great advantage we at The Citizen had in starting a paper in the modern age is that we were able to build both our paper and web presence at the same time. The distinction, though, is that unlike the print edition, there are no examples of classic community websites or good old-fashioned blogs to use as touchstones.

What we did have going for us is the aforementioned geek community who were able to guide us through producing a site that reflects our community. Some of that isn’t so visible — we use an open-source platform, a souped-up WordPress theme. We’ve also stuck to the idea that the site should be open, free, not cluttered with bells and whistles and flashing ads and easily searchable. We hope you find it so.

Like the paper, our website and blogs are a work in progress — running a website is a little like building a plane in the air. Thanks to volunteers Mike Li and Lucy Butcher we’ve been able to keep it all aloft and refreshed.

Recently, you may have noticed a major change in the layout and design of the site. That’s the result of graduate work by Michelle Langston. Michelle, a Chapel Hill native, was this paper’s first hire. She’s a capable designer and very imaginative coder. We were able to collaborate in both web and print to get both going at the same time. When she decided to go to grad school, she focused on the idea of creating a free, open-source web template for small newspapers and community news operations.

Over the past year, I’ve had the delight of collaborating with her on the project. And, coincidently, on the same day we received an award for having the best small newspaper website in the state, The Citizen began testing out Michelle’s latest design.

After this shakedown cruise, she plans on adapting a generic version of the theme for download, something that could help any small newspaper or news operation struggling to get its footing on the web.

So feel free to stop by and kick the tires and slam the doors. Tell us what you want in a website. We learned a lot from our readers and visitors in refining our last design, so please chime in. I’m at editor@carrborocitizen.com

1 thought on “FROM THE EDITOR”

  1. BrianR says:
    April 9, 2010 at 8:23 am

    The new theme looks excellent! Great job! Clean. Simple. Readable. Less can be more.

    Looking forward to checking out the open source version. :)

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