The Gazette’s Website

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Readers of the Gazette are encouraged to check out our fancier website, www.crozetgazette.com, where we are now publishing timely stories, more pictures, and all-in-all looking sort of technologically normal by 2009 standards. The old site was essentially a billboard for the newspaper with virtually no functionality beyond providing downloadable pdfs of the current and back issues and contact information. Now our headlines are actually searchable. (This month’s most frequent search subjects: Harris Teeter and supermodel contestant Colin Steers.)

Newspapers everywhere seem to be skidding toward oblivion as they contend with what looks like a defunct business model that doesn’t account well for the Internet and how it is characteristically used. No one has figured out yet how Internet news sources can pay for their reporting costs. To bring the news home, you still have to go wherever it is and capture it. Who knows where this trend will end up, but local newspapers seem to be on slightly better footing if they serve their localities fairly and stay humble in their idea of what community news really is. The Gazette means to be western Albemarle’s hometown newspaper and is trying to deserve our readers loyalty. By the way, there is some available ad acreage on the Gazette’s share of cyberspace.