FARLEY: Why did we change our website? It starts with the sudden death of a brilliant young man

I’m not comfortable with technology. Particularly new technology. I’ve been late to the game in pretty much any new technology trend you can name. Usually, it was work that prompted me to finally give in and do things like join social media.

I say that because I want others like myself to know, I feel your pain in our recent website transition.

If you were using our old website and were happy with it, I understand the angst over making a change. I like my routines too.

But this wasn’t change for the sake of change.

I wanted to share a little of the background behind this move.

Our original website — which we called Tracker — was built by a sweet and wildly intelligent young man from Cape Girardeau. James Baughn loved hiking, history and photographing bridges. He was known amongst our newspapers in Southeast Missouri not only for his intelligence, but also for his patience in helping each of us acclimate to posting our content online and getting it out to the public.

James died suddenly in 2020.

The website system he created for Rust Communications’ newspapers, which include publications across Southeast Missouri, was nothing short of brilliant.

It was easy to use for everyone in our newsrooms — from the recent college grads to the 50-year veteran reporters who still remember when we put the paper out with paste up boards.

But Tracker wasn’t finished. And a lot of the intricacies of the website system lived inside James’ mind.

He did such a good job creating this system, we were able to continue for a long time without him.

Yet, like all things in life — whether it’s your plumbing at home or your smartphone — pieces aged, wore out and broke.

A lot of those issues weren’t visible on the front side, but were for the staff.

One you may have been impacted by was our ability to send out morning email newsletters. Not everyone has received those in recent months and the function was down altogether for a while. This had to do with problems with Tracker.

We’ve known for a long time that Tracker would need to be replaced, which is why a team from Rust Media has built our new site. We call it PubGen.

It has been constructed with continuing input from our staff. The builders of this new system are working to customize it for our communities.

It does require a new way of signing in. You also may have to explore a little to find your favorite content.

We’re happy to help with all of this.

I’ve talked to a few people, members of our office on the front lines have talked to a lot more. We can help via phone, email or in person.

Another situation remedied by this that not everyone will like is password sharing. This new website allows each subscription to be active on three separate devices.

As an example, we had one subscription on the old website that had 6,000 logins in 90 days. Because that username and password were being shared with an extremely large group of individuals.

While we understand and support family sharing, there does have to be a limit.

We’d love to be able to give our work away to everyone for free, but our employees have families and bills, just like yours. For them to be paid for their time and work, we need subscribers and advertisers who are paying for content. Content that is clearly important to our community if one account was accessed 6,000 times in a 90-day time period.

Beyond that, we also do provide a lot of free access content as a matter of community service. This includes obituaries and matters of public safety, such as requests from law enforcement for help resolving crimes and important weather and health alerts.

To everyone who seeks out our content, whether it’s via the website, print or social media, thank you for supporting community journalism.

Donna Farley is editor of the Daily American Republic and Dexter Statesman. She can be reached at dfarley@darnews.com.