The Independent Blog

Posted by The Independent on March 19th, 2008 in Website

As you might know, The Independent was sold  in November of last year to a new company called GateHouse Media. This meant a lot of changes internally for us, but it will also mean some changes for you, the readers of our website. We will be launching a new look for our website that uses completely different software than we normally use to publish to the web. It will also allow us to move toward a 24/7 news cycle. Stories will be published online directly from our reporters and editors when they are complete. As of right now, I don’t believe we will be doing a nightly upload of tomorrow’s stories once this new site is launched.

I will know more next week when a rep from GateHouse arrives to train everyone on our new platform. But I can tell you it will be a big change, and there will be a learning curve when it comes to finding stuff. We will try to make it as easy as possible to navigate and find your favourite sections and stories, but we do ask you to bear with us while we learn it ourselves

I know what you’re wondering. “Didn’t you guys *just* redesign your website less than a year ago?”

Yes we did. And we had no way of knowing back in June of 2007 that our parent company was going to sell us to a new company who would require us to change it the site again. That’s just sort of the way it goes in the online world sometimes.

Don’t get me wrong - we’re very excited to be a part of our new company. We believe they want the best for us and every paper they own. I just wanted to give some heads up on the changes coming down very soon. Early April, I believe, is the target time for all of this.

So… heads up If you have questions, please don’t hesitate to email me and I’ll try to answer them as best I can. My contact info is on the right.