The San Diego News Network homepage showed a "BETA 2.8" version on March 18, 2009.
Three days before the San Diego News Network’s site went live, the last printed edition of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer marked the end of 146 years of delivering news via smashed-up trees. Naturally, my questions abound for the new venture; how does it plan to succeed besides saving money on pulp, and what role will it assign to still photography?
One day before SDNN arrived, a tiny tumult of Twitter tweets is the result of SDNN’s delayed arrival – a message on the SDNN homepage heralded a March 18 release date but the day came and went without a launch. In fact, every single mention of SDNN I’ve heard so far has come from online sources.
On March 20, a message on the SDNN Twitter feed played coy, hinting at a soft launch later that day. This, along with an outlet on their site for user-generated content, left me wondering whether this new network will try to maintain a line of more intimate communication with its demographic.
My first impressions of the site are positive. At first glance the front page looks like any traditional newspaper’s homepage, though it is a lot less cluttered. But, clicking on stories shows a dedication to incorporating audio slide-shows into its feature articles. I am glad to see that they have adopted the Soundslides software for their embedded multimedia.
Despite the contributions of plenty of writers, I’ve had trouble finding photography done by anyone other than the visuals editor, Don Kohlbauer, who lent a solid audio slideshow about urban farming to one of SDNN’s first feature stories, or the multimedia editor, Steven Bartholow, who shot stills of a prostitute through the back window of the “look out” car for an early article. I hope their list of photographers grows as their site works out the kinks. I can put up with Voice of San Diego only having one photographer (Sam Hodgson), since they only have a handful of reporters anyway, but I really want to see strong original photojournalism from a site that claims to be the future of news at a time when newspapers are on their way out.
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