TimesDispatch.com Enriches Readers With Return to Breaking News

Audio Slideshow: Fighting For a Comeback to the Doorstep

Media General returns the Times-Dispatch brand to its roots as a source of online breaking news while replacing its community portal inRich with a relaunched Richmond.com.

By Paul B. O'Brien

Setting aside a brand that has more than 150 years of recognition may not make sense to many, but that is just what Media General did with the Richmond Times-Dispatch when it launched the community portal inRich.com in 2007.

Launched on April 16, 2007, the same day as the tragic Virginia Tech shootings, inRich.com took away focus from the tried and true brand, according to Michael Fibison, general manager for Media General's Interactive Media Division.

Fibison points out style discrepancies for website information printed in the Times-Dispatch.

“The Times-Dispatch name wasn't being used,” he said. “For awhile, it was just redirecting. If you typed in TimesDispatch.com it was just going to inRich.com”

Communications consultant and former site manager for inRich.com, Laura Bland said the move didn't make sense to many in the newsroom – or to readers.

“No one understood abandoning the TimesDispatch.com brand, especially the Times-Dispatch,” she said.

Bland described the launch of inRich.com as Media General's attempt to compete with Richmond.com, a site it acquired in 2008 and relaunched on April 8, 2009 – just eight days shy of what would have been inRich's second birthday.

“Part of the story of inRich is the great desire everyone at Media General had to figure out how to compete with Richmond.com,” she said.

“What everyone really wanted was based on that model. A site that catered to the reader's need not just for news but information about living in the community,” said Bland.

O. Reid Ashe

Chief Operating Officer for Media General, O. Reid Ashe described the reasoning behind the ascendency of inRich.com above the Times-Dispatch brand as an attempt to reach a larger portion of the online audience.

“As long as our site has the identity of the newspaper, it's going to attract the people who are interested in newspaper content, but that is just a small subset of the online audience that we want to have,” he said.

“So the idea was, ok, let's create a separate brand that'll be farther reaching than TimesDispatch.com and that's why we created inRich. When it became possible to acquire Richmond.com, that was a better brand for us to flow into.

“I think we're going to execute on that vision much better this time,” said Ashe.

Fibison shows off the new Richmond.com, several days before launch.

Fibison described the transition back to TimesDispatch.com as a breaking news site to complement the Richmond.com community as the natural correction of a mistake. “My question has always been, why were we forcing these people to go to inRich, where it had a different focus. It's not the newspaper.”

“Let's give them what they want!” he said.