A month ago I highlighted the new Tribune Company websites that were launching, starting with the Orlando Sentinel. Thursday night the company relaunched chicagotribune.com. The site is very similar to The Sentinel, although there seems to be less “stuff” on the Tribune’s site. The Sentinel appears to have more video, more entertainment features, and a Your Neighborhood section that I don’t see on the Tribune’s site. The top story on the site has video in the video section, but it’s not available on the story page. That’s one of the things I praised in my previous post. This site doesn’t have the TV-feel I described before. On the positive side, I have never seen a newspaper site with so many blogs. I counted 31. The blogs do enable comments, and reading them shows that users aren’t too happy that the historic Chicago Tribune logo has been replaced. Hopefully the paper will grow into this new site. I was really impressed with what I saw from Orlando, so perhaps the Tribune just needs more time to get it right.
Disclosure: I worked against the Chicago Tribune for 4 years while at cbs2chicago.com. I am a huge fan of the paper though. I respected them while I was there, and I still do.
NBC has launched a new site ahead of the big ‘08 campaign. Politalk.com is a forum-focused website that also includes news feeds from the NBC O&O stations around the country and msnbc.com. It doesn’t seem there is much activity on the site yet, but it has been linked to from the homepage of at least one O&O.
KNBC-TV in Los Angeles has created the new position of Executive Vice President of Digital Strategy and named Craig Robinson to the post. Robinson joins KNBC from Media General’s WCMH, the NBC affiliate in Columbus, Ohio, where he was the General Manager. This news comes just days after KNBC launched their new local entertainment site, YourLATV.com
YouTube has come out with a feature that lets you customize your own player, and it’s a very cool advance. I created a quick playlist of videos from the New York City steampipe explosion and made the custom player below:
Check out how all the thumbnails popup when you mouse over the bottom of the screen. There are choices for colors and another skin that shows thumbnails to the right. They have built in other bits of functionality as well - so play with it and tell us what you think.
There’s a lot of acquisition money floating out there, and in this podcast, Cory and Steve mull over what Lost Remote would get on the open market in a buyout. (Consensus: Beer.) Also, we discuss the strange things readers obsess over at LR, the new hyperlocal sites popping up from traditional media companies, Steve’s recent “work” in Spain, and what he hopes to find in Aruba next week (more beer.)
