On Sunday morning, we “soft-launched” out a new-look DotNews website on a new platform, WordPress. It’s the first major update to the look and functions of the website since 2009.
The old DotNews.com worked fine and served us well, but it looked its age and, well, it was beyond time for an upgrade.
We’ll let our readers be the ultimate judges of the results (please send your thoughts to newseditor@dotnews.com), but we’re thrilled with the results so far:
• We can now present The Reporter team’s work in a much bigger and crisper format. That’s especially noticeable with the outstanding photography of our intrepid news editor, Seth Daniel.
• We have more capacity to embed videos, including the weekly podcast episodes from our partners at DotLife and other segments, to accompany select stories.
• Adam Gaffin— the editor of the awesome Universal Hub— helped us migrate thousands of archived articles to the new platform, offering a treasure trove of older content from years past to our readership. Adam has been a tremendous help to The Reporter as we have made this transition to a new site. We couldn’t be more grateful to him.
• A very special thanks goes out to Jayme Washington, president and CEO of WashTone Media and her team, led by Jason Shaffer. They did an outstanding job bringing our vision for a revamped online news portal to life over the last several months
• We are very grateful, too, to the staff of the City of Boston’s Office of Small Business and the Mayor’s Office of Economic Opportunity and Inclusion, and the Boston Main Streets Foundation, which helped to make this re-design possible with grant funds and support as part of the Legacy Business Award program that The Reporter won in 2024. Their support has been a major factor in helping us connect with WashTone Media and other vendors who are advising The Reporter and our parent company, Boston Neighborhood News, Inc.
One of our favorite new features of the DotNews.com reboot is the big, colorful logo, which includes a vintage font that recalls The Reporter newspaper’s roots in 1983. But it really pops with the brilliant colors and craftsmanship of Andrew Houle, a talented artist whom we commissioned to design a new logo for our 40th anniversary in 2023.
The logo includes hand-painted interpretations of three of the most iconic Dorchester images: the three-decker, an old-school Red Line train, and the Corita Kent-designed National Grid Rainbow gas tank. This new flag across the top of our home page screams “home” to everyone who reads us, wherever they happen to be in the world.
There has never been a paywall at DotNews.com— and there is no paywall now. We want everyone in our neighborhood to have full access to the news and information that we all need to make good decisions about life in these challenging times.
But there are other ways you can help us continue to serve you and Boston’s neighborhoods.
First and foremost, please support and patronize our advertisers ,who use The Reporter in print and online to display their goods and services. Second, consider buying a home delivery print subscription (it makes a great gift!), which is still a great value at just $60 for 52 weeks.
Also, we now accept charitable donations to the Edward W. Forry and Mary Casey Forry Foundation for Community Journalism. Folks who want to support our work, but don’t want a print copy, might consider making a tax-deductible contribution to the foundation instead at forryfoundation.org.
Thanks to all. We hope you enjoy the new-and-improved DotNews.com. – Bill Forry
