It was a weekend of new newspaper Web site launches in the Triangle area. First, the Daily Tar Heel unveiled a new site. Then, on Sunday, The Herald-Sun in Durham, where I worked for about a decade and still do a little bit of work for now, rolled out a much-needed overhaul of its site. Instead of writing a review of it, I decided to play around with Screenr, which I just discovered, and create a screencast review. You … are … hearing … me … talk.

Post-screencast clarifications/additions:

• As I mentioned in the screencast, one thing I do wonder is how much time the very thin staff at the paper will be able to put into maintaining the site beyond just updating stories. With the new social media features, engagement with the users is important, but I just don’t know if they have enough bodies there to do that effectively.
• By “manage the user-submitted content section”, I don’t mean a lot of hands-on curating. Ideally this section would be set up in a way that users can curate the content themselves through things like rankings and tags. I do think the newspaper needs to monitor submissions in this section for story ideas and to occasionally highlight certain submissions, as well as listen to audience feedback and add or tweak features to make it serve the users better.
• Of the two local news site re-launches this weekend, the DTH’s new site is definitely the more exciting and promising one, in part because I know they intend to experiment with new things on their site and more importantly, they have the manpower to do it. The Herald-Sun’s new site looks pretty nice and is a big improvement over the old, broken site, but I just don’t know if they have the resources and manpower to use the site to its full potential. I hope I’m wrong, and I definitely wish them good luck.

For a more in-depth review, check out this post from Bull City Rising.