A month ago I highlighted the new Tribune Company websites that were launching, starting with the Orlando Sentinel. Thursday night the company relaunched chicagotribune.com. The site is very similar to The Sentinel, although there seems to be less “stuff” on the Tribune’s site. The Sentinel appears to have more video, more entertainment features, and a Your Neighborhood section that I don’t see on the Tribune’s site. The top story on the site has video in the video section, but it’s not available on the story page. That’s one of the things I praised in my previous post. This site doesn’t have the TV-feel I described before. On the positive side, I have never seen a newspaper site with so many blogs. I counted 31. The blogs do enable comments, and reading them shows that users aren’t too happy that the historic Chicago Tribune logo has been replaced. Hopefully the paper will grow into this new site. I was really impressed with what I saw from Orlando, so perhaps the Tribune just needs more time to get it right.
Disclosure: I worked against the Chicago Tribune for 4 years while at cbs2chicago.com. I am a huge fan of the paper though. I respected them while I was there, and I still do.