FALL RIVER, Mass. — Following a growing trend in print journalism The Anchor, the official Catholic weekly newspaper of the Fall River Diocese, has designed and launched its first-ever website to supplement the regular print edition of the 52-year-old publication.
The new website, www. anchornews.org, will include much of the same local news and features that have continued to make The Anchor a primary source of information for Catholics throughout the diocese for the last half-century, but won’t completely mimic everything from the 20-page print edition, either.
“We wanted to offer highlights from every issue — mainly concentrating on our locally-generated content — without detracting from the print edition or making it obsolete,” said Kenneth J. Souza, Anchor reporter and special projects coordinator who built and maintains the website.
“What we’re doing is a bridge to the future,” said Anchor Executive Editor Father Roger J. Landry. “It’s clear that in upcoming years almost all news is going to be digested through Internet-based sources, so we’re moving in that direction.”
“There are many faithful Anchor readers who aren’t necessarily computer-savvy and frankly aren’t interested in a digital version of the paper. But we also felt we needed to reach out to those who regularly get their news via the Internet and it made sense for The Anchor to have a presence online,” Souza added.
To that end, the new Anchor website will offer a broad range of articles, columns and content from the weekly edition beginning with all the local news covered by the in-house staff — mainly the “page one” material focusing on diocesan events.
In addition, most of the weekly columnists’ contributions along with editorials, obituaries, “Person of the Week” profiles, “Around the Diocese” events, and special series like the current “Year For Priests” reflections offered by local clergy will be posted online.
National and international articles from syndicates like the Catholic News Service, the Catholic News Agency and ZENIT that regularly appear in the print edition will not be replicated on the website and will remain exclusive to the print edition. The website will, however, offer links and news feeds to the syndicates, along with a “news ticker” of headlines from the Catholic News Service on its main page.
While the print edition of The Anchor is published every Friday, Souza said the website content of that issue won’t be updated until the following week so that subscribers are still getting their news first.
“Many newspapers are simply offering all of the content people pay for in their print edition online for free,” Souza said. “We were sensitive to the fact that our longtime paid subscribers should be getting preferential treatment, so we decided to limit the amount of content we posted on the site and delay the updates so the print edition remains the most timely and complete edition of The Anchor.”
“The challenging thing for us is to make what we’re doing accessible to readers within our diocese and elsewhere, while not putting ourselves out of business by putting the entire paper up on the website immediately and therefore making the newsprint edition superfluous,” Father Landry added.
Souza sees the website as a natural extension of the weekly print edition and noted there will also be opportunities to provide exclusive ‘web-only’ content online that can’t be done in print.”
In addition to the aforementioned “news feeds” and links, sections of the new site are also devoted to bonus photo galleries and YouTube videos of local events, complete downloadable PDF files of previous special supplements published in the print edition, and contact links to staff members and various sites of interest throughout the diocese.
“There are some great features on the website that offer a lot more than we can in the print edition,” Souza said. “For example, we used a Google events calendar to provide ‘Around the Diocese’ announcements for every day of the week. It’s an interactive calendar where you click on the date to see what’s happening.
“We’ve also set up a new Reader Survey for 2010 using Zoomerang that will take you mere minutes to complete simply by clicking on a few multiple-choice answers. We’ve also joined peer sites like Facebook and Twitter to further expand our presence on the World Wide Web.”
In this age of cyber-shopping, www.anchornews.org will also provide those with a PayPal account or anyone with a major credit card the opportunity to purchase subscriptions online and will soon broaden the service to include special items like the annual diocesan Catholic Directory and to make advertising payments online.
And soon clients will also be able to place web-only advertisements online with direct links to their own websites.
“The website will provide us with an additional outlet to reach readers and prospective clients of The Anchor,” said Anchor advertising manager Wayne Powers. “Several current Anchor advertisers have already expressed interest in online advertising and this is just another resource for them.”
Built and designed using Sandvox software over the past several months, the new Anchor website already offers a complete year’s worth of archived issues going back to January 2009 and plans are in place to eventually post older archived editions online.
Souza said it’s been an ongoing “work in progress” and he’s excited to finally launch it and have the website “go live,” as they say.
“We’re going to continue to tinker with it as we move forward, constantly trying to improve the print edition as well as what we make accessible for the web,” Father Landry said. “But we’re very excited to be launching into cyberspace and we hope, like the Letter to the Hebrews says, to throw our ‘anchor’ upward and hopefully inspire, form and inform people and give them hope across the diocese and country.”