Buckinghamshire Advertiser: It's Not Just A Blog

There are lots of discussions about how newspapers need to evolve, and many of them focus on the lessons traditional news outlets can learn from blogs — how to update more frequently, accept submissions and comments from readers, or how to make archived content easier to discover and share.

Well, the Buckinghamshire Advertiser in southeast England has taken those lessons to heart in relaunching its web presence: The newspaper’s site is now published entirely with Movable Type. And that makes the Buckinghamshire Advertiser today’s Movable Type Featured Blog.

There are often debates about this sort of thing — if you’re using a tool like Movable Type, which is platform designed for blogging, but it’s being used as a general content management system, is the output still a blog? Our answer: Who cares? The important thing is that the Advertiser’s staff has an easy way to share news and updates with their community, and the Buckinghamshire community has a simpler way to keep up to day. The Press Gazette offers an astute analysis:

Trinity Mirror has clearly realised that properly customised blogging tools can do everything that a much more expensive content management system would be able to. The web developers and software houses that produce complex, expensive CMSs should take note.

Just as sites like thePlatform and Seed Magazine show us, content that’s created with blogging tools doesn’t have to look like a traditional blog. All that matters is that a site connects with its audience in way that’s meaningful and useful. The Trinity Mirror team that’s relaunched the Advertiser has achieved exactly that — and the new Buckinghamshire Advertiser is ample evidence.