Blufftontoday.com

Every time I look at this site I keep remembering "Doug." Maybe you might not remember this cartoon show that aired on Nick until I think ABC or Disney bought the rights to it. Anyway, in said show the titular hero, Doug Funnie, lived in Bluffington. So Bluffton is what is being said, but all I'm hearing is Bluffington. I so can't take this name seriously, though I should.

But we must be serious, at least to finish this post, so here we go with that one...

How does this site make money? Well, like most sites that are newspapers, well, Hell, most newspapers even, are getting money from ad space they sell on their site. Does the content match? No, but well enough that it isn't outrageous. You won't see ads for sexual paraphernalia on this site, but a random car ad, sure.

The content on the site seems not too far removed from most other news sites. There is a link to the newspaper version where most of the news is going down, but the site offers blogs from members of the site, no anonymous ones. These are made by buffton readers. There is also use of media to supply news. From the first front page I notice the use of traffic cams to give information to the readers. Going to other parts of the site give more, such as: http://www.blufftontoday.com/node/11183 where we see a robbery at a Piggly Wiggly from the security cams at the store. This allows readers to see and experience the news they can read about in the local community they are in.

There is also a few audio files and there of course are always photos to view.

Basically the interesting part about this paper is how you read the paper. It is a link to the print source which you view in this online window in a sort of adobe .pdf viewer.

It seems like the paper has really accepted the online version, but still can publish a paper as well, I assume, since I don't know Bluffton well enough to know it's offered offline as well. It also does not charge money to see backdated material, and allows them to be viewed at least from today up until the beginning of this year.