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Well, we're definitely not your father's or mother's newspaper. We're the Internet version of The Abilene Reporter-News, which is the oldest continuous business in Abilene, Texas ... established only months after the town in 1881. Texnews.com is the umbrella -- or portal -- site under which the online version of the newspaper - Reporter OnLine - makes its way to people all over the world. And we have a lot of other content on the site as well, including one of the most comprehensive Dallas Cowboys sites online, and Abilene2000.com, a site devoted to the approaching Millennium.
But we're more than that. Even though we will repurpose a significant amount of print content online, there will also be Texas-wide content online that isn't in the local newspaper. It's much cheaper, of course, to place content online than on paper. And we're dedicated to making that online content easy to find through a well-organized site and a search engine that meet your needs.
We're not going to try to look like a printed newspaper. You find your information differently in a printed newspaper than you do online, and we want to be organized in such a way that you can find that news and information as easily with your computer as you can thumbing through the various sections of a printed newspaper.
We also believe in interactivity. People are flocking to the Internet for chatrooms and other interactivity as well as content. We also want to make it easy for you to not only give our online product feedback but our print product as well. Such buttons for sending a letter, giving feedback, asking for help, etc., are scattered throughout our site.
The Reporter OnLine came to the Internet in February 1995 with a dozen or so pages graciously hosted by Abilene Christian University. In the spring of that year we transferred our content to a commercial host-server and expanded operations. In the spring of 1996 we began sharing a Web server with our sister paper in Corpus Christi - The Caller-Times. During our history, we've made a total of seven migrations of content to larger and larger servers.
We were the third newspaper in Texas to have presence on the Web - behind the Austin American-Statesman and the Dallas Morning News - and only the second to offer news updated daily.
In the fall of 1995 we filled a niche on the Web by creating a series of Dallas Cowboys pages on our site. By the summer of the following year, we were breaking traffic records daily. In just a matter of months we had gone from receiving 30,000 hits a month to well over 35,000 hits a DAY. As we enter 1999, the site is receiving a MILLION page views -- not hits -- a month.
We're constantly working on redesigning of our web site. But that's only the beginning. We'll keep putting additional content on the site as well as updating the look, feel and functionality of it.
We're going to get well over 12 MILLION page accesses at texnews.com in 1999, and that's not counting traffic to our popular Online Classifieds. The number of users just keeps growing. We will continue to strive - as our slogan states - to be "Your Place in Space." And that goes doubly for those Internet users who are trying to find news and information about the state of Texas. This will be where they come to find that information.
Alliances with our E.W. Scripps sister papers should only help us reach our goal.
Back to TEXNEWS.COM
