www.roanoke.com

Our development team is excited to share an image of the redesigned roanoke.com homepage.  Keep in mind it’s not functional, but it will give you a preview of the design and a sense of our priorities as we continue work on the new site. (It’s best viewed when you double click on the image).

You may notice the image in the center of the page is large much larger than photos on the current roanoke.com. You will see greater emphasis on photos throughout the new site. There will be more galleries and none of our photos will be displayed in Flash, so they will be viewable from tablets and mobile devices.

Another new feature is a blog called Times Square, located about midway down the homepage. This blog is intended to be like an information concierge, pointing out new features of the site, and highlighting what stories are being talked about either on our site or in social media.

You will also see all of our blogs are easier to find on this homepage (listed down the left side of the page). You will find the blogs in this same spot throughout the other pages of the site. You’ll also see social media buttons and tools for sharing news and photos throughout the site, making it easy to share content. One of our primary goals with the redesign has been to make the site more engaging and to highlight people, and these areas of the gateway are some examples of how we’ve done that.

Take a look at the page and give us your thoughts. If you missed the previous post on the new navigation, check it out,  and you will see the navigation bar in better context here on this homepage.

Your feedback is important to us as we continue development of the site and prepare it for beta.

Over the past few months, we have been exploring different commenting platforms, and we have selected Disqus, a commenting system used by many media outlets. We selected this system because it offers a lot of the features we heard from you are important. We are currently testing it out on “Damage Done“, a three-part series on the impact of heroin addiction on two local families.

Optional social sign in.

With Disqus, you can sign in through your Facebook or Twitter accounts, or Google and Yahoo, or you can set up an account with Disqus. If you choose a Disqus sign on, an email is required, but you can select your screen name and protect your identity if you prefer.

Social sharing.

You can also share your comment on Facebook or Twitter to get your friends and followers engaged in the topic. Find this option under account settings—edit profile—services.

Thumbs up.

You can vote for others’ comments – similar to Facebook “likes”. You do not need to be logged on to like a comment.

Moderation.

We will continue to moderate all comments. You can also report a comment. To flag a comment, click the flag symbol at the bottom of the comment.

Threaded comments.

Disqus allows users to reply to others’ comments or post separately. The threads are nested so it’s easy to follow the conversation.

Keep up with the conversation.

You can see what others are saying by subscribing to the thread of comments on a story, and receive email notifications when someone has replied to your comment. To do this, when you are in Disqus, go to account settings—edit profile—notifications.

Check out this new commenting tool. Once you sign up through Disqus, you can adjust your personal settings within your account to subscribe to threads, post to social sites and much more. Check it out and tell us what you think. If you’ve used Disqus on other sites, let us know what you like and dislike about it.

JEANNA DUERSCHERL | The Roanoke Times On July 2, David Robertson and Steve Jones removed juice from the Mick-or-Mack IGA shelves in New Castle. The store had no electricity, but was still serving customers by using generator power to use their cash registers.

Now that the derecho has passed and the power is back on, we want to hear from you about how you stayed connected to news throughout the storm and the days following.

We realized that many of our readers were not getting the news the way they normally did because of power and Internet outages and many were bunking with family and friends or staying at hotels, where access to computers was more limited or non-existent. Very quickly we started using as many channels as possible to share storm and storm recovery-related news — especially mobile channels.

The night of the storm, we sent a rare text message, directing readers to our mobile website, m.roanoke.com, for updates about the power outages and storm damage. We sent another text alert on Saturday with the same message.

During the weekend, we used Twitter and Facebook around the clock to give updates on when power was expected to be restored, and even what businesses were open. Our use of Facebook that weekend might have been one of our most successful (and useful) examples of crowdsourcing: We asked our fans to report what businesses were open or closed, and that post received almost 100 comments full of helpful tips our newsroom couldn’t have produced alone.

To make it easier to find storm-related stories, we organized all of that content in one area, and those links were prominent and accessible from pages on roanoke.com and m.roanoke.com.

Later in the week, we hit the streets and captured Roanokers sounding off about the derecho in this video.

These events are hard to plan for, so we strive each time to better understand what worked and what we can do differently to keep you better informed and connected. So tell us how you stay connected and any suggestions on what we can do next time by taking the poll below.

And if you have ideas on how we can continue to harness the power of social networks for public service, please share them in the comments or in the poll.

Keep up with our live coverage of the Miss Virginia pageant by following our Twitter feed @RkeTimesLive.  We will be tweeting continuous updates, including many photos, as the participants take the stage tonight for swimsuit and more talent competition at the Roanoke Civic Center. You can join the conversation by using the hash tag #MissVa.

Interns Emily Mosh and Evelyn Rupert covered the preliminaries Thursday, and will return tonight and again Saturday evening, when the next Miss Virginia will be crowned.

Earlier this week we used live tweeting to cover Mitt Romney’s visit to Salem. Using social media allows us to publish news as it’s happening . We also had four bloggers capturing reactions to Thursday’s Supreme Court ruling: Blue Ridge Caucus, MedBeat, Dan Casey and RoundTable. The format allowed a variety of venues for different conversations to occur quickly after the release of the ruling. Check it out here.

If you don’t use  Twitter, you can still see our coverage of the pageant in the The Roanoke Times and on roanoke.com.

Have you checked out our @RkeTimesLive twitter feed? Let us know your thoughts.

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s visit to Salem on Tuesday gave our newsroom a good opportunity to expand how we use social media tools in our reporting.

Six staffers attended the Romney event at Carter Machinery, each armed with a smart phone and, thanks to recent training sessions from online editors Stephanie Ogilvie and Caitlin Saniga, ready to use Twitter to post updates and photos from the scene.  Editors behind the scenes in our downtown Roanoke newsroom worked efficiently to pull tweeted images into Storify and continuously posted updates on roanoke.com.

There were some 200 tweets about the event beginning in the minutes after Romney took the stage. There were many tweets before he appeared too.

Roanoke Times’ staffers snapped and tweeted about 20 photos that were added first to Storify and later to a photo gallery.

Editor Carole Tarrant said today’s coverage was “a new record of getting that many photos on the site that quickly.”

Photography editor Natalee Waters managed the Storify feed of Roanoke Times photos fed to her from Salem, while Stephanie Ogilvie updated the Website with breaking news posts and other information. Thanks to NRV editor Todd Jackson for suggesting Storify during Monday’s planning session.

The staffers on the scene in Salem were:

-         Emily Mosh, a summer intern from Washington & Lee University, live tweeted the play-by-play on the @RkeTimesLive account.

-         City hall and politics reporter Mason Adams wrote a quick speech overview for the Web site and the turned his attention to a write-through for tomorrow’s print edition.

-         Salem reporter Matt Chittum also wrote a scene-setting story about the crowd of more than 1,500 people gathered that was posted online in the late afternoon.

-         Photojournalists Rebecca Barnett and Kyle Green captured visuals, tweeted and transmitted images to the newsroom.

-         Community journalist Miranda Beck also covered the event for So Salem blog.

Roanoke Times staff decided Monday to use the hashtag #romneysalem on Twitter.

“It worked,” Tarrant said.

Today’s approach was noticeably different than 2008 when the Roanoke Times covered then vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s visit to the Roanoke Valley. Two reporters and two photojournalists staffed that event, with one pair at the Roanoke Regional Airport and the other at the Salem Civic Center where Palin spoke.

What do you think of today’s coverage of Romney’s visit? We want to hear from you.

–  Courtney Cutright, reporter and member of the RefreshRT team

Caitlin Saniga

Storify is one of the new ways we’re exploring telling stories on roanoke.com, and it involves you and your social media presence. It’s an online tool that allows users to search for keywords, phrases and hashtags (even taking into account proximity to a specified place) on sites including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Instagram, Tumblr, Google and many others.

Let me give you an example of one of our stories. On April 20, Roanoke was a bubble with runners and supporters who had gathered for the Blue Ridge Marathon. There were lots of little stories unfolding leading up to the marathon, during the race and after the runners crossed the finish line. And many of you were talking about it online. Using Storify, we were able to gather posts, photos, maps, videos and more from the community.

From that, a story very different from the one we ran in the newspaper the next day was told on roanoke.com as it was happening. We followed along as runners laid out their gear the day before the race, as supporters gave their well wishes, as racers progressed along the course, as participants displayed their bloody socks and marathon medals and as some chowed down on cupcakes and beer in the area after the race. What a day! As one person on Twitter put it, “Just reading about the Blue Ridge Marathon makes me exhausted.”

In that Storify feed alone, we heard from more than 75 different sources across platforms including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. We saw 35 photos, 2 maps, 1 chart, 1 video and more tweets and Facebook posts than we can count. It seemed like the Blue Ridge Marathon crowd was a chatty bunch.

So we thought we’d try again with different audiences in different scenarios. So far, we’ve rounded up conversations from the Virginia Tech graduation and several other graduation ceremonies, Festival in the Park, and a severe weather situation that ended with a rainbow — and the dialogue has remained robust.

But there seem to be endless ways Storify can be used in storytelling.

With that in mind, I have a few questions for you:

Do you post to social media sites when you’re at events?

Would you post to social media sites if you were in a newsworthy situation (surveying property damage after a tornado or watching a house fire, for example)?

Do you use hashtags on social media sites like Twitter and Instagram to make your posts more searchable?

What types of stories or events would you like to see us cover with Storify?

Thanks for your input! And let’s keep the conversations going.