www.roanoke.com

Hi RefreshRT fans!

Today, we’d like to introduce you to the newest member of the Roanoke Times blog family: Times Square.

The new blog is meant to be a hub of information about The Roanoke Times and the stories we produce. It will be managed by our social media editor Stephanie Ogilvie, who plans to keep it fresh with everything from our most popular story of the day to sharing news about our website redesign.

Here’s how Stephanie explains it: “We see this space as a community gathering place to help you connect with us — and other readers. We envision a bustling, digital public square (which helped inspire the name) — and a place to speak directly with you about why we do what we do.”

Times Square will be the new go-to place for newsroom information, and so it will absorb the From the Newsroom blog, which will be retired.

And it will also absorb this blog, whose goal had been to tell readers about new offerings from The Roanoke Times. Now that will be within the realm of Times Square, which the RefreshRT team will help populate.

So as we gear up to introduce our new website, please head to Times Square for the latest updates. We’re looking forward to seeing how readers will use the new blog and to the next step in the evolution of roanoke.com.

Hey RefreshRT readers,

I’m Chris OBrion, and I’ve drawn editorial cartoons for the Roanoke Times and roanoke.com since 2007. As roanoke.com prepares to be leveled by the tide and rebuilt as an entirely new digital sand castle, I’m wondering if you have any ideas for how editorial cartoons might be used in new ways. (And no, I’m sorry. I don’t know how to use them as digital birdcage liners for “Angry Birds.” But thank you.)

Right now I do a (usually) weekly color cartoon on a (usually) local or state topic. The cartoon appears in the print edition of the paper, on roanoke.com’s opinion page, on the Roanoke Times’ Facebook page (www.facebook.com/roanoketimes) and more recently, on the RoundTable blog. (I also post it on my fridge and mail a copy to my mom.)

Are there other formats or platforms you’d like to see for the editorial cartoons, or additional features we’re missing?

Thanks for the great feedback on national and international news headlines. It was heartening to see that our readers value local content, but also wouldn’t mind having national and world news so that roanoke.com would be a ”complete one-stop shop,” according to reader Sandi Saunders. That certainly is a goal of ours — to keep readers engaged on our site.

Other readers noted that the new site should not be cluttered with too much information, and to separate local content from others. Reader Phillip Murillas suggested an Associated Press ticker or widget feed.

Please keep sharing examples of sites that organize and display non-local headlines well so we can look at them for ideas.

This week we also shared the news that we’ve launched new weather tools on Kevin Myatt’s Weather Journal blog. Those who have tried out the radar and Futurecast maps like the fact that you can zoom right into your part of town — even down to your street — and that you don’t have to go to multiple sites for a complete weather picture.

If you’re out and about, you can also access the radar map on our mobile site, m.roanoke.com, on your smartphone or tablet. There’s a direct link to it on the main landing page. On Kevin Myatt’s blog on our mobile site, you can access the map if you go to the roanoke.com full site.

This post is from Luanne Rife,  a member of The Roanoke Times editorial board.

The Roanoke Times editorial board in December launched Point/Counterpoint to encourage informative debate on topics. Two experts are invited to begin the debate in the Sunday Horizon opinion section. The discussion then moves over to the RoundTable blog where we had hoped people would continue the debate and participate in live chats with the experts.

We like the idea behind Point/Counterpoint, but think we could have executed it better. For starters, the blog post became lost among all our other posts, and we don’t think we allowed enough time for people to dig into an issue before jumping to the next one.

This past Sunday, we initiated some changes. A Point/Counterpoint topic will appear over two weeks in Horizon. The first week will feature the experts’ initial essay. The second week will feature their rebuttals and comments gleaned from the RoundTable.

In the interim, we’ll feature it prominently on the RoundTable to make it easier for people to jump into the conversation. (For a fuller explanation, read my column here.) In fact, a lively discussion has already erupted with more than five dozen comments about home-schoolers and sports.

We’d like to hear your suggestions on how we can make this more user-friendly and of value to you.

1. Have you looked for Point/Counterpoint online? Were you able to find it easily? Did you join a discussion? What would make your experience more worthwhile?

2. Have you seen online debates at other websites that you thought were done well?

3. What topics get your blood pounding? Your eyes glazing?

4. What other suggestions would you have for us in presenting this feature or in drawing in participants?