Streaming The Hogs

With the shift this week by the NWAnews.com and WholeHogSports.com sites to paid content, we are making some adjustments to the News and HogBlogs coverage on our site.

First of all, after taking input from many of you, we have decided to continue our long-standing policy to not link to paid sites.  As we’ve said before, we want to avoid frustrating our readers by sending them to articles that they may not be able to view.

While we don’t agree with the changes being made by the management of the Democrat-Gazette to shut off free access to their content, we appreciate their business decision and wish them well in the future.  (And we will continue to link to posts on the free Slophouse blog.)

As for the changes to our site, starting today we are combining our Network Headlines and HogBlogs sidebar widgets into one area that we’re calling “The Stream.”

The line between blogs and media sites has certainly blurred over the years.  When we first started this site, sports blogs were written entirely by fans like us.  But now, at least in our opinion, there’s very little reason anymore to keep content from quality fan blogs and media outlets separate.

For those who use Twitter, the format of “The Stream” will look very familiar:  a short publisher name (based, if possible, on their Twitter handle) followed by a link to the blog post or news article.

And speaking of Twitter, we’ve also added a widget to the top of our sidebar listing our most recent Twitter updates.  Nothing earth-shattering there, we know.  But it will give us a way to send out breaking news quickly to our site readers as well as those who follow us on Twitter.

While these changes were somewhat forced by the changing landscape of Razorback news coverage on the Internet, we also think they are an improvement over what we were doing before.  As always, of course, we welcome your feedback.