Postnet.com: On Aug. 3, 1999, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch launched the Community Web Sites network as an integrated part of its news-and-information Web site, postnet.com. I was one of five newsroom editors on the design-and-management team for the site as a whole, and head of a two-to-four-person team to design and run the community program. Like many newspapers at the time, we gave Web space, training and publicity to community groups in our area - but we aimed to take the concept farther. The community area's prominent place on postnet.com's home page indicates not only its importance as a project in itself but also an unusual notion for integrating it into the Web site. We intended to pair community-generated information, forums and events directly with news produced by Post-Dispatch journalists, so that when readers came to our site they would be able to read what journalists had to say about an issue, then what knowledgable community groups had to say, and then head off to events, related Web sites and (someday) online databases to deepen and broaden their understanding of that issue and get personally involved. We looked forward to a time when much of our best information for the community came from the community, and we would be experts at pairing, matching, sorting and combining it with news. | Next Page | Back to Resume

Which links on this page work? None.
Disclosure: The page below is a composite of most of the Feb 1., 2000, home page and the Aug. 11, 2000, communities window, which is more representative of the norm than the one that actually ran on Feb. 1. Click here to see the original page.