New MontereyCountyWeekly.com features expanded content and increased interactivity, and streaming media

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Oct. 22, 2009

Contact:

Bradley Zeve CEO bradley (at) mcweekly.com

Erik Cushman Publisher erik (at) mcweekly.com

Kevin Smith Director of New media Kevin (at) mcweekly.com

SEASIDE, CALIFORNIA – Monterey County Weekly — the community’s hyper-local, award-winning, 21-year old local and independent media — today launched a complete redesign of its website (MontereyCountyWeekly.com) and launched a corresponding mobile application (montereycountyweekly.com/m). The new Monterey County Weekly website offers enhanced interactive features and searching, a easy-to-use Local Biz Guide, 24-7 streaming news, easy to use functionality and a modern design.

“The redesigned Monterey County Weekly.com site will be a boon to our community, expanding our content and how our readers can obtain and interface with it,” said Bradley Zeve, CEO of Monterey County Weekly. “It offers more in every way — more accessibility and more content. We’re a local media company that’s integrating our traditional media with the new technology. It’s an exciting time for us, our readers and advertisers.”

Some of MontereyCountyWeekly.com’s enhanced new features are as follows:

• LOCAL BIZ GUIDE: A consumer guide for local businesses, sortable by city or business type, offering users a direct link to local businesses, fostering a BUY LOCAL campaign.
• STREAMING LOCAL MEDIA: Constant feeds 24/7 from local, state and national news sources.
• ADVANCED CALENDAR SEARCH: Searchable by date, city, or type of event, for this week’s or weekend’s events, and the future.
• ADVANCED RESTAURANT AND WINE SEARCH: MontereyCountyWeekly.com’s complete restaurant and wine section includes write-ups of every local restaurant and winery, by city, cuisine type or appellation, the most complete food and wine guide in all of Monterey County.
• LOCAL BLOGS, updated 24/7: Capturing live feeds of the local blogosphere, Monterey County Weekly readers and website users can keep tabs on the community’s latest buzz.
• SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMATIZATION: News, features, and the Weekly calendar are now easier to find in MontereyCountyWeekly.com’s improved search feature and are also more accessible through your favorite search engines.
• LOCAL SONG OF THE DAY on the Monterey County Weekly.com JUKEBOX: Local music fans can listen to over 140 local bands and musicians, who have their songs on our local jukebox, with a new song featured daily.

“Our newspaper has been successful because of its great content and design, and will remain a fixture in this county for years to come. And I must admit, even though I’m old school and use a blackberry and a PC, our new media — combining print, web and mobile — has got legs, too,” said publisher Erik Cushman. “The newspaper is dynamic and available at over 975 locations, and with the improved website and mobile functionality, readers can get up-to-date content wherever they may be.”

Zeve added: “The new website and mobile platform will enable our readers to remain deeply connected to our community wherever they are, receiving the essential hyper-local content we publish in the newspaper, online, or with their mobile phones.”

The website and mobile app were designed in-house by longtime Weekly staffer Kevin Smith. Says Smith, “I’m delighted this project is ready for public consumption — really happy. It’s a real integration of print, web and mobile media. Plus maybe now I can have time to read my kids a good-night story.”

About Monterey County Weekly

Founded in 1988, Monterey County Weekly is the largest circulated local newspaper in Monterey County, reaching more than 100,000 readers per week into nearly 30% of the households directly. Readers of the Weekly are active and educated, eat in restaurants several times per week, and are a local consumer-powerhouse.

The Monterey County Weekly® brand also extends beyond the print publication to include Monterey County Weekly NOW (its website) and the Best of Monterey Bay Visitors’ Guide®. The company is based in Seaside, working from the halls of famous architect Charles Moore’s first-commercial office building. The newspaper was the first in the country to derive 100% of its energy from solar energy, and the only local media in the tri-county area to send a reporter to the Iraq war.