Penton —Journal website is worth checking out

The subject of this column might read like it emanated from a memo from head office, but you’ll have to take my word for it that it has been inspired only by my own curiosity and my embarrassment in not promoting it earlier.

But here’s the goods: The Journal’s relatively new website is pretty terrific.

Thanks to our technological geniuses throughout the Glacier Media Inc. company, the Journal website has more information than one could logically expect from a weekly publication.

In fact, we’re the best ‘daily’ in Brandon, as far as websites go.

For the first few months of my stint here as Journal editor, I would quickly scan the website to make sure that week’s stories were properly posted. It was only later than I scrolled down to the bottom and found a plethora of information that allows me to be fully informed every day.

Thanks to the Canadian Press wire feed to which all Glacier Media newspapers websites are hooked up, the latest in national news, international news, sports, entertainment, business, etc., are found on our site at the click of a button.

Our “local” information, of course, is merely a reproduction of what has appeared in the paper, and since more than 35,000 homes in Brandon and Westman receive the hard copy of the paper each week, they’ve already seen the local stuff. Daily local news is found on The Sun’s website, but you have to be a subscriber to access it, which means if you want to read it twice, you have to pay for it at least once. The same goes with their provincial and national news. Click on a story and you’ll get the first paragraph or so and then a box asking you to fill out a subscription order.

But the Journal’s site has no such restrictions. All the latest national, international and sports stories are there. There’s a business-news button, which gives you the latest business stories. Another button takes you to the day’s top entertainment stories. There is a weather button that when clicked brings up the current situation and five-day forecast from Environment Canada. There is also daily horoscope, which is useful if you want to know whether it’s advisable to get out of bed that day. Selected videos from Canadian Press are offered.

The site also has a “photo gallery,” where we post pictures of major events in the city. And they stay on the site for a year or more, so you can scroll down to a gallery of photos taken at the Kinsmen pool last August, for instance, and get instantly warmed up. When our editorial staff is covering an event, we might take 30 pictures and have room in the paper for three or four. So what happens with those non-published ones? They often end up on the website, as we did with our Lieutenant-Governor’s Winter Festival pictures from Feb. 4-6, or from a whack of a pictures we took in the aftermath of the blizzard in late January.

But there’s more. The website has a button to activate information about the latest movie releases from Hollywood and a quick link to show times at the Empire Theatre in Brandon. There’s also a “TV listings” button that offers that day’s schedule of programs on a few hundred channels.

Another feature is the “community events” section where (under ‘community’ and then ‘events’), people or organizations can submit their own information about meetings, social happenings, tournaments, etc. Go there, fill out the information and it will appear online as soon as it has been approved by our staff. It’s easy. We hope to get that feature going strong.

Overall, if you want information about what’s happening in your world at the click of a button, the wheatcityjournal.ca site is pretty impressive. And if head office decides to send me a bonus as a gesture of thanks for this informative column, I’ll donate it to charity.

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