By: Staff Reports Post-Dispatch Publisher Dumps postnet.com
Pulitzer Inc., publisher of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, announced this
week that it is ditching postnet.com in favor of a new regional portal called
STLtoday.com. The site was unveiled Thursday.
STLtoday.com President Colette Hogan told the Post-Dispatch that
Pulitzer's strategy is shifting away from the primary goal of delivering news.
"Our goal is to develop the winning portal for St. Louis," she said.
Visitors to STLtoday.com will find nine channels, including news, business,
sports, jobs, and neighborhoods. News and other content is provided by at least
two dozen companies, including Dow Jones, Reuters, and The Associated Press. A
link on the home page will take readers to a separate page for the Post-
Dispatch at http://home.post-dispatch.com/.
Hogan told the Post-Dispatch that the redesign is a simplification of the
site. "It's too cluttered," she said of the old design. "We have great content,
but it's buried in so many links you have to click through and click through and
click through."
Postnet.com was also killed because of a dispute over the name with PostNet
International Franchise Corp. of Nevada, according to the Post-Dispatch.
That company owns the trademark to "postnet."
Hogan's unit operates independently of the newspaper, and is looking for its own
news editor.
In January, Hogan told E&P magazine: "Newspapers' first inclination was
to just put the newspaper online, but that doesn't fit the Internet
environment." Pulitzer may be bucking a trend here; many newspaper companies are
now forcing their new-media and print divisions to work more closely together.
Copyright 2001, Editor & Publisher.
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