News Announcements are a bit like a cross between our very own billboard, a library, and our own Google.

 

The original idea for this feature came from Gwen who wondered if we could have a feature where other people could contribute Announcements (based on another site she uses). After she brought this up, a blogger posted a blog asking for there to be less bloggers and to all blog in the some coordinated system. That suggestion is unworkable if for no other reasons than most bloggers are already set up using the system they like.

 

Which brings us back to News Announcements. News Announcements have the feature of recapping and linking to other information. A news Announcement can be anything. Think of a News Announcement as a bookmark or PostIt about a place on the web. It can be a forum post, a blog or blog entry, a website, a picture, etc. A News Announcement can be anything you can summarize and link to. Even the entirety of many items can be placed in a News Announcement.

 

News Announcements help give the community the flexibility to communicate the way they want. It doesn’t matter if someone likes to blog, create a website, make videos, do a radio show, etcetera, all the person has to do is make a News Announcement and anyone who reads the News Announcements will know about it!

Thanks, Ken,

It is great to get reminders that things aren’t as obvious as I might have assumed. This is part of what I wanted to work out before we go live.

The News Announcements can be reached by the Jericho Telegraph menu (Jericho Telegraph and Jericho Telegraph > All News Announcements). The main menu (Jericho Telegraph is set up a bit like a news paper) where the All News Announcements are all the Announcements including the Announcement archives.

They may work their way in a small part onto other pages (perhaps like ‘ticker news’ with a scrolling article), but for the most part they’re a separate section.

One of the goals of the website is to function as a resource including a resource to other Jericho fan efforts. For instance we contacted and invited Jason of the Jericho Times (see the link under the Jericho Telegraph menu) to join the site. We hope that the News Announcements would occasionally help projects like the Jericho Times with content they may not have seen, or in a pinch may not have the time resources to find.

We hope the media section will (when implemented) do the same. We can all find Jericho Related fan videos, but it would be nice to have a catalog which categorizes those videos.

It is also my hope, that the Jericho Telegraph will inspire people to create threads. For instance, some of the rating stuff mentioned on the forum is drawn from storied entered into there.