Today, we unveil yet another version of WNYMedia…we’ll consider it a “soft launch”.  We’ve still got a few things to work out, but we’ll be working on them through the course of the day.  The site design is based on feedback from nearly 1000 readers that we’ve received through various surveys we’ve done over the past six months.

Our plan is for WNYMedia to become a distribution point for what’s happening right now in our region.  We plan to introduce new features including live feeds, streaming video, podcasts, streaming radio, twitter/facebook integration and a consolidated feed of articles from our bevy of writers.  Our focus is on usability and ease of navigation, which were issues in the previous design.  Including our partners (Artvoice, WECK1230 and YNN), we’re creating upwards of 40-50 pieces of content each day, but we weren’t making it very easy to find or share.  We’ll have better tools for finding recent stories and an ability to track how they develop.

We’re adding all sorts of new functionality, but most importantly, this is a massive reorganization of content.  A reorganization of how we create, display, share and comment on the various articles we write everyday.

Previously, we created content which was published to an individual blog where everyone would read, share, or comment on the article.  We then aggregated links to the stories to the front page of wnymedia.net.

That’s changing.

Now, we will all be creating content on the front page of wnymedia.net.  You’ll see the excerpts of the articles along with the photo of the author who wrote it.  You’ll click the title to read, share or comment on it.  We’ll also aggregate the articles from each writer on their own author page, which you can access by clicking their name.

For now, poke around, tell us what’s broken, tell us what you like and what you don’t like, etc.

We’re just hoping this goes better than the Digg relaunch from last week…