Sentinel.com blog

We’ve made a handful changes to the Sentinel home page this week.

We’ve added a breaking news twitter widget to a fairly prominent position on the right side of the page. We’re encouraging all reporters and editors to break news first on twitter, and to send photos, video and audio links through twitter from the scene of breaking news.

To make a little room for our widget, we’ve reduced the number of stories at the top of the home page. We think this will also make it easier for readers to find the best of our coverage. For more local coverage, including all the stories in today’s news section, see our local news page.

Among other projects, we’re working to build a list of Santa Cruz area bloggers on a wide variety of subjects. We will link out and highlight the best content, no strings attached. Submit your blog or website to the list here.

You may know that MediaNews, the Sentinel’s parent company, is now run by Digital First. This is good news for the website. One of the first moves will be to add a little staff to the online department here at the Sentinel (although everyone on staff contributes in many ways to what appears online). Christina Gullickson will be doubling the size of the Online Team, beginning in January.

For more on what’s ahead and what Digital First means for MediaNews, the Sentinel and as a concept, see this week’s blog posts from Steve Buttry.

• How a Digital First approach guides a journalist’s work
• Digital First journalists: What we value
• 10 ways to think like a Digital First journalist

Posted from Santa Cruz, California, United States.

When there’s an earthquake felt in Santa Cruz County, we’ll have immediate updates on our site.

The best place for information is the U.S. Geological Survey page with live reports of all earthquakes in the area. We also display a live USGS widget on our earthquake page, which includes informational links, latest stories and a ton of content related to the Loma Prieta quake in 1989.

When the quake centered near San Juan Bautista hit last night at about 8 p.m., our story was posted (by City Editor Julie Copeland) by 8:10 p.m. We received a huge spike in web traffic that hour. We had also just posted Cathy Kelly’s story about earthquakes last Friday and Tuesday night. Here’s the chart of our page views:

Traffic spike shown just after 8 p.m. (chart is East Coast time)