Today at The Hub we are excited to debut a brand-spanking website filled with new features, functionality, and perks to improve how you consume, interact with, and support our independent journalism and commentary.
Let’s start with what we have built to help you better access our content, based on your feedback and the help of our developer Uncommon Sense.
For starters, you are going to see a lot more use of colour. Each of our major content areas, from news, to commentary, to podcasts, to DeepDives, has a colour code. This will help you quickly scan our homepage and dig into the content you want, fast. You will also see on our homepage more curation of the stories that really matter and where we think you might productively spend your time.
Staying on the theme of efficiency, you can now use our new continuous scroll function to seamlessly transition from one article to the next, without having to click away to another page on the site. You can also swipe right and left to scroll between thumbnail summaries of news articles, data graphics, commentaries, and long-form journalism. Our goal is to help you get to the content you want as quickly as possible, while also giving you a sense of everything we publish.
If you let us keep a cookie on your web browser (note we have a strict privacy policy not to share your data with third parties) the site will start to learn what content you enjoy by topic area (e.g. economics versus politics) and format (e.g. news versus commentary). Your reading preferences will show up in a sidebar called “Recommended for You” and in continuous scroll. At any time, you can go to our home page and see all our content unfiltered by your reading habits.
We are also announcing the integration of WhatsApp as The Hub’s interactive discussion forum, for our readers to analyse and debate the day’s news and commentary. We are excited by how WhatsApp can help us foster a two-way conversation with you about the issues you care about, allowing us to better understand what topics and debates you want to see in our digital pages day in and day out. The Hub’s WhatsApp community will feature two groups, one where you will be sent The Hub’s latest news and commentary each day directly to your device. The other will serve as a discussion board for readers to debate the issues.
Note that the new Hub WhatsApp community will replace Hub Forum, our current daily web-based discussion thread. Thank you to everyone who took part in Hub Forum!
One big difference with the new site is that you will begin to see that some content is accessible to subscribers only. We are doing this selectively to reward our users who have gone the extra mile to financially support our independent journalism. So, what does this change mean for you as a regular Hub reader?
First, if you are a Hub Fellow or previously were a paid Hub subscriber you automatically have access to all the paid content on the website, in our new and improved newsletters, and on our podcast feed. For Fellows, this access is for as long as The Hub keeps publishing. For previously paid-up subscribers (monthly or annual), this is for six months starting June 1, 2024, and encompasses the benefits summarized in our new Hub Hero membership level. To reiterate, if you were a paid-up subscriber as of May 2024 all your benefits remain the same and they are grandfathered until November 30th of this year.
To access subscriber-only content on the new website, simply input the email associated with your existing Hub subscription when prompted. You will be automatically enrolled in our new paid newsletters and as a valued financial contributor, you will have access to the full-length editions of all our podcasts.
If you are not a paid subscriber, you can continue to access TheHub.ca. The choice is yours: either pay-as-you-go to read our best content or join at one of three different subscription levels starting at $10 per year. You can upgrade to the next subscription level at any time by only paying the difference. Each level unlocks more benefits and again supports our independent journalism.
This is both an exciting and uncertain time for digital news and commentary outlets like The Hub. In the space of just a few years, our industry has been transformed by fast-changing consumer habits (e.g. most young people get their news, alas, on TikTok), massive government intervention into the funding of newsrooms in Canada, and across-the-board declines in once semi-reliable revenue sources such as email newsletters and digital subscriptions.
But against this increasingly volatile backdrop, The Hub is thriving. In the last 30 days, and just three years since our founding, over one million users engaged directly with one part or another of our digital publishing platform encompassing TheHub.ca, our email newsletters, podcasts, and social media.
And we are still growing. We are adding new reporting capacities, such as data visualization journalism. The depth and sophistication of our commentary offering supersedes anything in the mainstream media. Our podcast feed is generating over a million annual downloads per year. Our new DeepDives series is driving the public conversation on important policy issues. And we are doing all this without taking a dollar in government subsidies, ensuring we remain genuinely independent and beholden only to our subscribers.
In sum, we hope you enjoy the new website and continue to make The Hub an essential part of your daily news routine. And please keep your feedback and comments coming to editorial@thehub.ca. Many of your suggestions and ideas helped shape the website’s new design and functionality.
Thank you!
Rudyard Griffiths, publisher
Sean Speer, editor-at-large
Harrison Lowman, managing editor
The post More signal. Less noise. Welcome to The Hub’s new website! appeared first on The Hub.
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