Commentary By Adam Smith

The North Jefferson News



Newspapers are an ever-changing medium.

Just like people can now listen to the radio online and watch television and movie clips on YouTube, more and more newspapers are turning to the Internet to entertain and inform readers. To keep up with the changing times, I am proud to announce that The North Jefferson News is now available online.

You can now find the same stories that appear in today’s paper at www.njeffersonnews.com. Our Saturday edition will be uploaded on Mondays. However, we’re going to make an effort to upload something new on days in between just to keep things interesting.

And while our site is online, it’s still a work in progress. We hope new features, like a community forum and a question of the week poll, will be added within the coming weeks. Something else we’ll be adding in the coming week are advertisers who have graciously chosen to be a part of our exciting online venture.

When I first came to The North Jefferson News in May of last year, the paper did have a Web site. However, the site content was about four years old. People listed as being staff members were long gone and the stories were a little moldy.

Thanks to our corporate honchos, the old content was taken down and a new site was built for us. We’ve actually been uploading content for a couple of months now, just to get the hang of what we’re doing.

Let me take you through some features of the site. You may want to actually look at the site while you’re reading this. Consider this your instruction manual.

Below our “North Jefferson News” banner on the home page, you’ll see the sections of our paper. Everything from local news to local sports to stories about health and pets can be found by accessing these links.

In that list of sections, you’ll find a link to “cars.” Clicking that link takes you to BamaAutoFinder.com, which is a database of thousands of automobiles for sale in our state.

Over on the right hand side of the home page, you’ll find a button for monster.com. Through a corporate partnership with Monster.com, you can link directly to the job-finding Web site through us. Area businesses who want to place employment ads can now do so with us and have it seen by thousands of job-seekers on Monster.

Below our Monster link, you’ll find a business directory that enables you to look up information about any business online. Just type in what kind of business it is and the city and state.

Within the coming weeks, you’ll see advertisers on our home page and through the site. By clicking on their advertisement, you will either be transported to that advertiser’s Web site, or to a map which tells you where the business is and a phone number. Not all businesses in our readership area have a Web site, but we hope our online initiative will inspire others to do the same.

We’ve also partnered with Legacy.com to post local obituaries on Legacy’s Web site. Through Legacy’s site, family members of passed love ones can access an online guest book and other options. This allows friends and family members a chance to view obituaries and send words of encouragement from states or countries away.

We hope our readers will enjoy being able to access us on the Internet and we hope you’ll find our site to be useful. However, our print edition isn’t going anywhere. There will actually be some features of the print edition that won’t be available online like community photos, birthdays and birth announcements, weddings, engagements, graduations and things like that. Those will only be found in our print edition.

We hope our readers will come visit us online and see our new Web site. We’re awfully proud of it, and we hope you like it as much as we do. Thanks again for your readership and support.