I remember Savannah as a gray place on a dreary day after Christmas in 1992, but then again, that’s what riding a Greyhound bus for 25 hours will get you: unlimited views of rundown downtowns. Advice to Greyhound: move your stations to shiny suburban malls.
Here’s a far more colorful vision of Savannah:
That’s the new front page of SavannahNow, the online home of the Savannah Morning News. (The old version is still up for comparison purposes.)
Inside, you’ll find lots of reader participation, complete with avatars, blogs, photo galleries, and what looks like a Yahoo-ish rating system for news stories.
It looks like a pretty strong move to turn the site over to the readers, although I’m still missing the ability to comment on individual news stories, but I’m sure the already-busy forums, which appear to serve that role, will be carried over to the new site.
“The highly simplified homepage may give some newspaper traditionalists heartburn. News is inside. So is advertising. Up front: Four basic choices and a search engine. Dive in.”