Daily Telegram unveils new website

The Daily Telegram’s news editor David Panian sent out the following excerpt announcement:

If you’re reading this on our website, you’ve already noticed our new look. If you read the Detroit Free Press, USA TODAY or other Gannett newspapers’ websites, the look will be familiar to you. This change is one of the fruits of GateHouse’s acquisition of the Gannett chain just over a year ago.

Benefits of the new sites include faster load times and some great features that we didn’t have online before: comics such as Classic Peanuts, Get Fuzzy, Garfield, Calvin and Hobbes, and For Better or For Worse and advice columnists Dear Abby, Miss Manners and others. There are also many of the crossword puzzles, sudoku and games you may have found on our old site. You’ll also find links to national and world coverage from our partners in the USA TODAY network, which includes papers across the U.S.

Something new you’ll notice from time to time is that some stories and other items on our sites will be marked “for subscribers.” We believe our work has value, and we hope that you will find enough value in our work to subscribe to the website. If you are already a print subscriber, you will have access to the subscriber-only features. If you are a subscriber and do not know how to sign in to the website, please call our circulation departments — 517-265-5111 for the Telegram and 734-242-1100 in Monroe — and a customer service representative will help you.

We won’t be setting aside a lot of stories for subscribers. We will save those for items that readers cannot get elsewhere, such as photo galleries from high school games or stories where we spent some extra time looking into a subject.

That does not mean our “paywall,” as newspapers call it, is going away. This is where readers are asked to subscribe if they’ve read a certain number of free articles in a month. Readers will still be able to read three articles for free each month. Readers who register an email address with us will be able to read two additional stories each month before being asked to subscribe.

If you find yourself wanting to read more than five articles a month, it seems like you’re finding value in what we do and we ask that you sign up for a subscription.

Subscribers to the website also get access to the e-edition of the printed paper. That is a service that takes the files we use to print the paper and puts them online in a format that allows you to read each story and even make digital clippings, if you want to save a story or send one to a friend.

We hope that you like our new websites and that you’ll be able to support our work with a subscription. If you would like to share your thoughts on these changes, for Monroe or the Telegram, please contact regional editor Ray Kisonas at rayk@monroenews.com. For the Telegram, contact me at dpanian@lenconnect.com.