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We’re excited to announce the beta launch of a new site called Bakersfield Tween Tribune that, while designed to reach younger students, is appealing to older readers as well.

Bakersfield Tween Tribune has a dual mission:

1. to deliver news that’s of interest to younger readers
2. to give teachers FREE easy-to-use tools that allow students to participate in discussions around local and national news, and thereby learn important reading, writing and analytical skills.

Those discussions can be “walled off” so that students within single classes at individual schools can interact around news stories among themselves. For example, a seventh-grade English class at Fruitvale Junior High School can have their own version of the site, with story comments posted by that class's students visible only to that class, not even others at the same school. (The national version of the site contains comments submitted from readers not affiliated with particular classes).

Tween Tribune is a great tool to improve reading, writing and analysis skills in a controlled environment. Teachers have complete control via full moderation tools (all comments are moderated before appearing online), as well as the ability to design and share lesson plans with others at their school or district.  And as you can see by perusing the site, all stories are “safe” and suitable for younger readers. But as one adult told us, “I found myself wanting to read a lot of the stories I saw. There’s a lot of interesting stories for anyone.”

Tween Tribune was created by a father of two "tweens", and is being tested in other cities. Teachers in other areas have been impressed with the site’s ease of use, the administration tools and the value to students. You can read more on their feedback here.

If you’re a teacher or school administrator, and are interested in participating or have questions (did we mention that it's FREE for user?), please contact our Californian in Education team.

As always, we’d love to hear your constructive feedback and ideas. The site is in beta, so you can expect some wrinkles during development. But now's the time to help shape the vision.

Thanks.
 

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BakersfieldEZAds.com is our newest local website and is designed to give businesses and organizations more options to advertise in our products, whether digital or print.

BakersfieldEZAds is built around the concept of self-serve, which means we give you the tools to create your ads yourself in a matter of minutes. It’s convenient: open 24/7, easy credit-card payment, a variety of design options and the choice of audiences you want to reach. And you don’t need any special design or technical skills. You simply customize a preformatted template by adding your own advertising message, image or company logo.

Current offerings include print and online ad options in The Bakersfield Californian, The Californian’s Applause section, bakersfield.com, Bakersfield Life, Bakersfield Voice and Smart Shopper.

We plan to expand those offerings in the coming months.

BakersfieldEZAds is for print and online display ads; you can continue to place your self-serve classified ads on bakersfield.com.

As always, please share any constructive feedback or ideas.
 

Well, we finally discovered what was causing the "save as draft" bug on blog posts and rolled out the fix this morning. 

If you've been experiencing this problem, you'll notice that all the posts that you tried to save as drafts in the past are now in the unpublished section of your blog settings page. 

If you have any questions, please leave a comment. 

Thanks!

Justinian Hatfield, Sr. Product Manager

 Hi folks, 

This morning we made a change to the site that we hope will address the "blogs are slow" problems that some users have been experiencing. 

The problem stems from the system trying to count how many unread messages you have in your inbox. If you have lots (we're talking thousands) of unread messages, the blogs were slow because the software counted all the unread messages each time you visited a blog. 

We're no longer counting all of the unread messages on the blog pages, so you should see an improvement on the page load times. 

Thanks!

Justinian Hatfield, Sr. Product Manager