EDITOR: The following was prepared by Doug McVay as a briefing for the web site designer engaged to revamp www.RealReport.org / www.Newslanc.com. It is so insightful, that we are posting it here.
Background:
NewsLanc was created in 2006. Initially it acted as a gadfly on Lancaster County (PA), providing an alternative to the local news monopoly and exploring local politics and questionable public finances such as the county convention center and the local hospital.
Beyond that, NewsLanc was an experiment in nonprofit activist journalism. The scope of its coverage expanded, and it eventually was renamed RealReporting.org.
The mission statement probably explains it best:
Unlike commercial media which must strive for circulation and viewers and do not want to offend advertisers, NewsLanc.com does not hesitate to praise and to criticize. No individual or institution is exempt.
Our purpose is to protect the public from the foolish, the provincial, the greedy, and the predatory.
NewsLanc was launched for the purpose of countering failures on the part of local print media to report thoroughly and truthfully on local controversies. Because the Lancaster Newspapers, Inc. has regained its business and journalistic integrity, NewsLanc now devotes greater attention to state, national and world wide events through links to articles from a variety of sources.
Furthermore, we have provided a means by which citizens can report or express their views in anonymity to protect their livelihood and social status in the relatively provincial Lancaster community.
If you don’t occasionally get angry at what we write, we are not doing our job. And if you stop visiting because an article made you angry, then you do not appreciate what NewsLanc is about.
Instead, write us a letter for anonymous publication and take us to task! NewsLanc is meant to be a forum, not just a blog.
That mission statement also explains what we’re looking for in terms of the website itself.
Where we are now:
NewsLanc/RealReporting still covers local Lancaster politics, and not surprisingly broader Pennsylvania politics. It also features pieces on Russia and Eastern Europe, on regional and national politics, and to an extent on popular culture.
At the most basic level, NewsLanc/RealReporting is a blog and discussion forum. It’s not an advertising platform. It’s not a venue for eye-candy. We don’t do click-bait. Visitors don’t come to the site to catch the next cute cat video or the latest top 10 list. We cover the entertainment industry, with our Santa Monica Reporter column by screenwriter/director Dan Cohen, but we’re not the place people go to see beautiful people on red carpets and hear about what dress an actor wore the previous night.
Having said all that, we’re not Luddites. We have moved well beyond simple webpages hand-crufted with straight html. The WordPress content management system works for us because it gives us an easy-to-use interface for posting and editing stories, it’s reasonably secure, and it has a range of plug-ins and widgets – only some of which we actually use, such as the commenting system, an internal search, and Google analytics.
The problem we’ve run into is simply that over the past several years, the WordPress engine that drives the site has not been updated. We’re still using WordPress MU 2.9.2. mAs a result, we’re losing some functionality – the analytics, for example, and the search function is experiencing sporadic problems.
Beyond that, there’s the issue of not being “mobile-friendly”, and of not even being able to install tools that would allow us to deal with that.
Where we want to go:
We’ve always striven for multi-platform functionality. We view that as a necessity, not merely as buzzwords. We don’t want a site that only looks good and functions properly when viewed with the most current version of Internet Explorer on a fast new computer. We’re not concerned with winning awards from a tech website nor even from a design magazine. The words “plain vanilla” can sound hurtful yet in many ways, that’s what we’re looking for: more NY Times or Washington Post, and less Buzzfeed.
What we’re looking for is simply a revamped site. It should be clean, functional, easy-to-read and easy-to-use, it should have a mobile-friendly version for smart phone users, and it needs to retain the archives which we have built up over the past 9 years. It needs to look good, and to serve as an information source that’s easy to use.
“LNP has regained it’s business and journalistic integrity”.
Really? They are still little more than a shill for PSP, and ‘beautiful, robust, vibrant’ downtown.
They won’t challenge the Mayor or Police department on all the unsolved murders.
Amazing that during the entire week of the ladies Open Golf Tournament, nothing ‘bad’ happened in Lancaster City to be reported.
Or is it just on ‘hold’ until all the tourists, journalists leave?
Who made out on all the $25 million dollars being spent in Lancaster County this week? Corporate Lancaster, or Mom and Pop?
We’ll never know.