Scrippsnews goes into live beta


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Scripps Howard News Service is giving it’s new “for the public” Web site a higher profile.
According to the site, Scrippsnews.com has moved into the “live beta” stage. We added a link to it at the bottom of knoxnews.com yesterday, but the Web site quietly went up in February … so quietly I hadn’t seen it until yesterday.


They are calling it:

… an online magazine of current events and culture featuring news, in-depth analysis and investigative reporting as well as opinions and commentary from a network of exclusive columnists and bloggers. It also features a very robust forum for discussion of news and current events.

An arm of E.W. Scripps (the company I work for), the news service is trying some interesting things here.
For one, it’s very blogosphere oriented. There are links at the bottom of stories that search delicious, digg, reddit and technorati for content that contains the story’s URL. Another blog-like feature: The “trackback” URL is displayed at the bottom of the story.
For another, they have a “news aggregator” feature that pulls in content from the newspaper and media organizations that provide content to news service. Of course, news services are “news aggregators,” but it feels a little like digg.com than a wire feed.
There are forums, blogs, technorati “linking to this” links, an XML feed and ad avails.
An interesting experiment — and hopefully a site that will become a smashing success.
Good luck to SHNS honcho Peter Copeland, tech wizard David Johnson and whoever else on the scrippsnews.com team!