This was a project that was started by Geoffrey Welders, extended on to Nich and Misti. I think Misti is our current editor. Ethaniell made some suggestions last night in our meeting and it got me thinking ...

We saw some great work (and you can see it again in a thread in our RP section of the forum). I'm thinking of revamping that project, on the web, and making it the center focus of the "community" section of the website.

We'll always have the forum as a separate tool, but I want to grab a professional newspaper template for wordpress, customize it, set it up, connect it to our forums / flickr / individual blogs (using RSS and other methods), and make it the centerfold of our online community experience.

Think of something like CNN.com ... but it looks grungy, and created for the city of Hathian... and a lot of the content on it would be automatically propagated from existing blogs, forums & flickr

Key features:

1) Automatically pull threads title/links from specific web forums to front page
2) Automatically pull the police blotter from the forums into it's own section
3) Automatically pull Flickr images from our CD flickr pool onto front page ( we can also have featured photos )
4) Automatically feature/pull recent posts from existing CD Blogs into a a "personal life" column of the newspaper or something.

5) we'll have an "editor" and "authors" - authors can write articles and an editor can approve to be published - anyone can be an author, editor will just make sure it's newspaper worthy before going live 😛
6) the PD/FDH/Hospital can easily publish city Press Releases (an extension from what we do with group notices)

7) city will have newspaper stands all over where people can click to launch page directly to our online page

8) there are some interesting in-game web browser objects being built ... LL is also doing some things, so in the future, we may be able to bring this view directly in-world (without screwin around w/ the parcel media settings).

The key takeaway to this is - it won't be a whole lot of additional work ... simply a intuitive portal, in the form of an online Hathian Observer newspaper, that propogates user content from already existing tools like our forums, flickr, wiki, etc. all automatically + give an opportunity for folks to write for our fictional newspaper 🙂

example of said template: