The site won a Digital Edge Award last year for its Communities section, an area that the newspaper continues to develop to enhance the participation of visitors. You set something up, groups can create their own Web site, and that's about it. We've taken the approach of really trying to make this service useful to these community groups and users. Over 1,400 groups have a presence on the community site, which is laid out by geographic location. It's a very dynamic system.
People are in there changing things all the time.
This is a good demonstration of how we're trying to seize the category of a statewide service, and not just replicating what a newspaper does in its own community. Another popular area of the site is the Careers section, which gets about 500,000 of the site's 4 million monthly page views. It currently offers two aggressive ways to search, classifieds and employer profiles, and two slightly less aggressive ways, Pentawave's IdealHire and banner ads. The newspaper previously typed the calendar listings in a story format, cutting and pasting items that ran over multiple days, changing the date for each. Now the calendar items are entered into a homegrown system just once.