Welcome to redbankgreen 3.0.

The newest version of this seven-year-old authentically local news and information site comes with changes both cosmetic – as you’ve probably already noticed – and substantive.

The cosmetic is self-evident. The substance is hinted at above: PieHole and All Good are the names of new pages that we hope will satisfy particular needs in your life. And there’s some new fun stuff, too.

PieHole is all about food. Satisfying and nutritious news and feature stories about restaurants, wine experts, food stores, community farms, ice cream trucks, rooftop gardens – and the people behind them all. And it’s all local: you’ll find only here on the Green.

The All Good page carries news about kids, and charities, and volunteering. What do those topics have in common? The tagline for the page offers our take: “News From a Brighter Future.” The idea is to call out people and organizations making a difference, and those about to do so, in ways that affect all of us, however indirectly, and speak to a common goodness.

Unlike the rest of redbankgreen, the preponderance of the content you’ll see on All Good will come directly from schools and nonprofit organizations – and we encourage them to submit their news to us here. But you’ll also see a fair amount of  the kind original reporting you can still expect to find elsewhere on this site.

Yes, this is in addition to what we already do, not instead of it. The meat of what we do continues to be hyperlocal coverage that aims to capture as much of the vitality of the Green as possible.

Version 3.0 also comes with a bit of sass in the form of  Model Citizen, a new weekly feature. Here, we spotlight people we meet and interview on the street about what they’re wearing, and why. The aim of this look book is to convey a sense of how people who live and work in our community express their individuality through fashion choices.

So make sure you look your best when you leave the house, because you never know when reporter Mariam Barry will buttonhole you for a impromptu Q& A and photo.

The overhaul of redbankgreen was driven by aesthetic concerns and a desire to provide more comprehensive coverage of the Green, now and in the future, as we begin to roll out still more new pages and features.

But also nudging it forward were the needs of an important constituency: the advertisers whose success is critically important to our local economy, as well as to redbankgreen‘s business model as a free publication.

You may have noticed in recent months that we’ve been running ads that contain fresh content every time you look at them. These ads, which our clients update anytime they want from Facebook, Twitter or even cellphone, were invented right here at redbankgreen in an attempt to extend the magic of social media into a new realm. We believe editable ads are about to transform the way merchants and restaurateurs interact with the people who keep their businesses afloat, just as Facebook itself has changed… well just about everything it touches.

So we’ve rebuilt this site to accommodate more editable ads, with many more options for display and messaging, and more to come. If you’re interested in using this friction-free technology to promote your business, please visit our Advertise page, or drop us an email.

Finally, if you’re wondering why we number this  version of redbankgreen as 3.0, well, there were changes four years ago, when we moved from one publishing system to another. Version 2.0 was mostly back-end stuff, though. This one is by far more apparent to readers, and marks what we expect will be the beginning of another wonderful chapter for a story that began on June 1, 2006, with our launch.

We hope you like the new look and the new features, and we welcome your thoughts and comments. Please feel free to share them via our Facebook commenting system or by email.

John T. Ward
Publisher