Welcome to the new-look News24. I hope you will find it useful, informative, enjoyable, and an improvement on the older version.
The new site captures the essence of where we want to position the number one South African digital news brand– maintaining our focus on breaking news, but also being more of a destination for users to interact and engage with content and services from across 24.com.
As you navigate your way across the site, you’ll find plenty of new features and elements. For example, try our “Inside News24” section. Here you will find more in-depth news content and interesting articles from our other 24.com brands.
Two new sections - Opinion and Multimedia - have been launched, and will contribute greatly to increasing the depth of our existing news offering.
Our user-generated section, MyNews24, has received a big facelift. Users will now be able to rate content and authors; user-generated images will be featured more prominently; and the leaderboard will allow users to track the performance of their articles.
We have also incorporated semantic tagging – or automatic keywords - on all of our articles. This feature will enable us to present you with a link from the article you are reading to a list of automatically generated related stories. In the future we will be adding personalisation features so that we can automatically recommend relevant content to you from sources you may not have seen.
We’ve been working hard on this project for the past few months, and in fact it is still a work in progress, as we plan to implement further improvements in the months ahead.
Not only have we launched a new site, but our editorial team has moved over to a new custom-built content management system, which will make the publishing process faster and allow us a much more flexible platform to engage, communicate and share with our audience.
I would like to thank everyone at 24.com involved in a process that started more than two years ago - from editorial, design, development, marketing and business. A special mention should go to Philip Langley, whose designs you are seeing today.
This is your site. Let us know what you think.
Send us your feedback on the new site. If you are on Twitter, you can tweet us at @MyNews24, or leave a comment on our News24 Facebook page.
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Jannie Momberg is News24’s editor.
