Welcome to our new home

It’s been a long time coming.

Two years after The Eudora Times launched, we are thrilled to be in our new website home. You can access it two ways: eudoratimes.com or eudoratimes.newsnirvana.com. Either will take you to the same place.

We will no longer post new content to our old website. It will remain active for awhile longer, however, as we continue to move old content over here.

We hope that you are as pleased as we are with this new site. We are most grateful to Town News for their help getting our new site designed.

I want to walk you through some key aspects of the site.

First, visit our About Us section. It’s important for the community to know who our reporters are. We also have posted our ethics policy there.

Second, we hope you will sign up to receive our weekly e-newsletter if you haven’t already. Everyone who already was receiving the newsletter will already have their emails in our system. We’re taking a break from the newsletter today as we continue move-in, but will resume sending it next Wednesday.

Our e-newsletter is the “print” version of our paper that comes out every Wednesday afternoon with our content from the prior week. You can sign up to get it by clicking Register at the top of the page. Or, if you scroll down the home page a bit, you will see our Newsletters box above the Trending Now box. You can enter your email there to get our weekly e-newsletter that way, too.

Next, as you look across our new categories at the top of the page, you will see our Obituaries tab on display. We have received some obituaries in the last year, but not as many as we should. Obituaries are an important part of a newspaper to remember those who were part of the community.

If you click the Obituaries tab, you will find our policy. We accept obituaries submitted by funeral homes at [email protected]. Death notices are free. A full obituary is $30. A full obituary with a photo is $40.

Next, you will notice the Local Events tab. If you click on it, you will then see Promote Your Event. This is where any community organizations can go to get their event listed on our website. We want to see the CVB, Parks and Rec, the schools, the Lions Club, you name it, use this feature to create a centralized area for community events.

You will note that our events system also pulls in other events happening within an hour or so of Eudora that you may be interested in attending. We hope this will become a popular section of our website.

Going back to the home page, if you scroll down, you will see that we now have ads on our website. We hope that our next step will be garnering more local advertising and adding an advertising representative to our team.

Finally, I wanted to mention the bottom of the website. You will notice a section called “Online Features.” I want to make it very clear that this is NOT content written by Eudora Times staff.

This is outside content from Brandpoint, a Minnesota-based company that works with businesses to “tell their brand’s story through strategic creation and distribution.” In other words, it is not news content but public relations/advertising content.

You are certainly welcome to read it. But in this age of information confusion, it’s important that I’m clear in communicating what is news content and what isn’t on our site.

Finally, we were able to make the move to this more professional site due to significant donations we received in late 2020. Our next step is getting enough donations so we can have a more stable reporting team so that we are able to cover more in the community.

The ultimate goal would be to like the Scope, a similar endeavor by Northeastern University, where we can grow to eventually have a full-time employee supplemented by our reporting students. That may be a few years off for us as a long-term goal.

In the short term, we will continue to only operate during the school year and  again go dark between mid-May and mid-August due to lack of funding. We need to reach a point where our reporting students can quit their other part-time jobs and have The Eudora Times be their paycheck. If everyone in Eudora gave us $1 every semester, this would be more feasible.

Please donate to us so that we can continue our journey serving as your community newspaper.  You can do so here: tinyurl.com/y4u7stxj.

Welcome to our new home.