Stay tuned: NorthernLife.ca getting a new name, look

Growth, in many ways, is a process of re-invention and over the past 20 years or so, few industries have re-invented themselves more than news media.

The forces of change — propelled by the growth in digital technology — have pulled newspapers, and radio and TV stations in several directions at once. And while internally, media have suffered something of an identity crisis, one thing has remained constant: The public’s hunger for news and information.

In fact, that hunger is stronger than it’s ever been. People want their news and they want it now. It used to be that we, the media, demanded you make an appointment with us to get latest news. That appointment might be breakfast with the morning paper or dinner with the six o’clock news.

That just doesn’t work anymore. People want a constant buffet of news and information to snack on when they choose.

So that’s forced us to change, and that’s a good thing. It’s made us look at how we do what we do, and ask ourselves, “How can we do this better?”

At Northern Life, this has led to a good deal of soul-searching and now we’re ready to let the cat out of the bag. Two cats actually.

The first, you may have already heard something about. After years of publishing two papers a week, Northern Life will become a weekly paper (again) published Thursdays. Today marks our final Tuesday edition.

This makes good sense for us and for you. It means we will be able to offer you a bigger, broader Thursday paper with more features and more stories for you to enjoy, not to mention more pages for you to flip through. Your weekly flyers, of course, will still be there.

This change provides us the best opportunity to give you more of what you’ve asked for: stories about Sudburians, by Sudburians, for Sudburians.

The other change is a bit more substantial — we’re changing our online media. Come April 12, NorthernLife.ca, our award-winning news website, will be retired. It will be reborn as Sudbury.com, a name we feel better reflects who we are today and what we cover.

Sudbury.com is much more than a news website. I like to think of it as a “community information portal.” It’s a place where you’ll still find our top-notch coverage of news, sports and lifestyle stories, and our editorial commentary on the issues of the day. You can rely on us to still provide all the videos, letters, columns and obituaries we’ve always had.

But now we’re going to give you more. That community information you used to have to visit a handful of different sites to find, we’ll have it. Looking for skating times at a municipal arena? Sudbury.com has it. Need parking information for Health Sciences North? Find it at Sudbury.com.

Want to post a classified ad, adopt a pet from the SPCA or see what’s playing at the movies? Sudbury.com has it. What’s more, at Sudbury.com we make it easier than ever to share your good news (births, weddings, engagements, graduations) as well as provide news tips or search our extensive archives. You can even customize it to get news from your neighbourhood.

Our goal is to provide you with everything you’ll need to get through the day.

The new site will load blazingly fast and our new mobile edition offers everything you can find on Sudbury.com on any size screen you want.

And you don’t even have to update your bookmarks or links — we’ve already done it for you.

This is a design for the future, a design that allows us to deliver not only the news (on the hour, every hour between 7 a.m. and 10 p.m. with updates as they happen), but information about community services you can rely on.

Tell us what you think. Tell us what you love and tell us what needs improvement. If we’ve missed something, let us
know.

Sudbury is where we are and Sudbury.com is who we are. Everything Sudbury, all the time.

Mark Gentili is the managing editor of Northern Life.