On Wednesday, Sept. 19, The Gainesville (Fla.) Sun’s Web site rose with a new look and purpose.

The newspaper (Monday-Friday, 51,491; Saturday, 48,604; Sunday, 52,827) that day relaunched the site as part of a reconfigured newsroom aimed at delivering news and information 24 hours a day, seven days a week, said Jennifer Smodish Griggs, online director.

The redesign project went hand-in-hand with the reorganization of our newsroom at the [paper] this summer,” she said. “The reorganization moved The Sun to a 24/7 continuous news operation and it made us really start to think digital first in a lot of ways.”

Sun editors and managers spent six months redesigning the paper’s news strategies, working with specialists from The New York Times Co. Regional Media Group in Tampa. The result was new, easier-to-navigate designs for GainesvilleSun.com and companion site Gainesville.com, Griggs said.

Hands-on

Among the benefits The Sun wanted from its retooled Web sites was the ability to let newsroom editors update content and change layouts without forcing them to become expert HTML programmers.

“We wanted to give the editors the opportunity to be hands on with the Web site,” she said. “This gives the editors more flexibility, akin to the same flexibility they might have when they are laying out a print page.”

The Sun tapped Saxotech Inc. to supply the content management software necessary to allow editors to work on the site.

“We worked with staff from Saxotech and NYTRMG online support staff to make updating and changing the site easier for editors,” Griggs said.

The Sun also cloaked the site with video and offered readers the chance to post photos, videos and comments.

“We have dramatically ramped up the amount of video that our newsroom is producing on the main site as well as on our GatorSports.com site,” said Griggs, adding that the site posts from three to five videos each day.

Another part of the redesign allows The Sun to prominently place videos on the site, thus attracting more user response.

Another feature, Zoom, lets users submit a photo that can be linked to a Google map, Griggs said.

New doorway

The redesign also changed the purpose of Gainesville.com by making it more of a doorway into The Sun’s network of sites, which include GatorSports.com and other community content pages.

“That’s a change from the old Gainesville.com, which was a very long, deep page that visitors had to scroll down to see in its entirety,” she said.

The user-participation feature of the redesigned Gainesville.com got a workout soon after its launch, when readers flocked to post comments about the University of Florida student who was tasered by police at a John Kerry forum.

“We saw readers starting forums about it and posting comments on some of the individual news stories,” Griggs said. “Readers were also uploading some of their own photos of the event.”

The Sun’s revamped newsroom, meantime, is based on a hybrid print-online approach. Reporters are assigned to one of four local editors who supervise various local coverage areas, including breaking news, public service, trends, business, schools and transportation.

Reporters, in addition to their writing responsibilities, shoot video and audio for the Web sites, said Jim Osteen, executive editor.

Multimedia strategy

“All reporters now are equipped with simple video cameras and laptop computers, so filing both stories and videos to our Web sites is standard operating procedure for their daily routine,” he said. “We also created a breaking news team within the local desk operation to provide early coverage just for the Web.”

Additionally, mobile reporters file stories, pictures and videos as they circle the city looking for stories and events of interest.

To support the multimedia strategy, The Sun purchased video cameras, upgraded reporters’ laptop computers and added a high-end video camera to its multimedia desk.

“We also created a multimedia wall with four 50-inch plasma screens that has become an integral part of the newsroom,” Osteen said. “We hold all of our news meetings in front of the multimedia wall and use it to monitor our Web sites, play videos, make changes in our online news presentations and track our hits.”