The time has come for GMA News Online

Starting at 1 p.m. on Monday, February 7, this web site will be known as GMA News Online. But it will retain its original url, www.gmanews.tv. This change coincides with the launch this month of GMA Network’s brand-new all-news channel GMA News TV, which will air on channel 11, replacing QTV. GMA News Online will also come with a new slogan, “The go-to site for Filipinos everywhere." Our new brand, GMA News Online, more accurately reflects our place in the media world and thus the name makes more sense. Calling ourselves GMA News dot TV often confused those encountering us for the first time, although our old name eventually generated enough brand equity so that many of our users knew exactly what we do. A multimedia portal And what we do is provide a portal for GMA News content from across our network’s media platforms. News videos from all national news programs have always been found on our site. This month we will add video content from GMA News TV. And in the next several months, news video and articles in regional Filipino languages from our network’s regional stations will likewise be featured here. We are a radio portal too. A constant livestream of Super Radyo dzBB can be accessed by clicking on a tab on our home page. However, our users know that we are much more than an online gateway for traditional broadcast media. We publish as many as 60 written stories every day, in English and Filipino, many of these found nowhere else. We have a corps of web-exclusive reporters and writers who are often first with the news, tweeting and filing rapid reports of the first versions of breaking news before filling these out with the help of our capable news desk. Among other recent stories, we broke the news about the errors on the new peso bills, as well as the Pilipinas Kay Ganda tourism campaign which led to its scrapping. We publish photography, lots of it. But we do so in ways that traditional newspapers cannot: interactive slide shows that feature photo essays of top-notch photojournalists, some of whom can be heard talking about their subjects on audio casts; and home-page pictures that link to inside stories if you click them. We feature editorial art that satirizes the news, perhaps leading to new ways of understanding our often bewildering society. We produce our own sports talk show, FTW, online TV that is sharable and pause-able when one needs to interrupt viewing to do something else. A frontier We seek to do innovation, employing web tools to explore the frontier of online journalism. We were the first news web site in the Philippines to use Google maps in reporting disaster and missing persons, and Flash animation to illustrate how the nation’s first automated elections would work. For our May 10 election-day coverage and display of election results, we developed an interactive map (“the election dashboard") that drew a record number of page views for a single day (12 million on May 11, 2011). We created what we call a “news browser," an interactive display of curated stories from our site that we have used for various occasions, including PNoy’s first 100 days and the Ampatuan Massacre’s first-year anniversary. None of this front-end innovation would be possible without the stable and secure technical backend the network has provided us through GMA New Media Inc., which built a sandbox, so to speak, where creative minds can feel at home. We do this kind of work in the playful spirit of our age, but without losing sight of our main mission, which is to adapt technology to the information needs of our audience, so that Filipinos everywhere can form wise opinions and become better citizens. – Howie Severino, GMA News Online