Re: GNOME News - Progress and Plans

[Allan Day <allanpday gmail com>]

On Thu, Mar 1, 2012 at 11:06 AM, Dave Neary <dneary gnome org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On 03/01/2012 11:26 AM, Allan Day wrote:
>
> ...
>
> Thanks for the update! Looks like things are coming along nicely. Any
> feedback from the Journal authors & editors? Are they involved in the news
> rework at this point?
>
> To be an effective news site, we will need to be very selective about the
> content we agrgegate - I don't want, for example, an announce mailing list
> RSS stream sent straight to the site - and see half of the front page with
> fixed-width font that doesn't fit with the rest of the site. And we
> definitely need editorial control on what gets promoted to/included on the
> main news site to keep people coming back.

The current plan is to have two streams of content on news.gnome.org.
The primary stream will be original content, the secondary stream will
be aggregated from other sites in the same manner as the current
news.gnome.org site. You'll still be able to see (and subscribe to)
the aggregated content, but it won't have equal weight.

>> However, there are some outstanding questions that still need answering:
>>
>> * Should we have a comments system on the new site?
>
>
> Yes, definitely.
>
>
>> * Where should official announcements, such as press releases, be
>> made? Do they have to be hosted on gnome.org in order to look
>> official, or could they go on news.gnome.org, for example?
>
>
> I'd keep "proper" press releases somewhere else - the news site shouldn't
> just be a regurgitated press release, it should be a less formal,
> potentially more informative, commentary on the press release.

Makes sense.

>> * What does this mean for the role of GNOME Journal, if anything?
>
>
> I'd like to see this *be* the GNOME Journal.

I agree with Sri that we need to wait and see how things work out. If
GNOME News and the Journal both manage to become living breathing
sites, we'll have to try and come up with a sensible division of
labour (GNOME News sticking to current news and the Journal doing
in-depth articles, for example).

> What I'd like to see is have
> people sign up to a newsletter if they want, and have a monthly "Best of
> GNOME News" newsletter sent out, with links to the original articles & top
> stories of the month.

That would be great indeed.

Allan
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