This screenshot of eastvalleytribune.com was taken at 1:59 p.m. Sunday. Click for a full image.
Readers of the Phoenix area’s No. 2 newspaper were stopped dead in their Internet tracks today when they tried to go to eastvalleytribune.com and found the website had disappeared.
The ailing East Valley Tribune already told readers last week it was making its third round of cutbacks this year, laying off more workers and reducing the number of days it would print to just three. So the newspaper’s online followers could be forgiven if they worried just a little bit when they went to the newspaper’s website and were greeted with a generic page that simply said, “This domain name has expired.”
The Tribune printed its regular Sunday edition this morning. And the website was fully functional late last night. But early this afternoon, a loyal reader of Heat City called me with a tip: The Trib‘s website was gone. Sure enough, I clicked over at a little before 2 p.m. and found the same thing. The person who called me wanted to know where it went, and I did too.
A couple phone calls later, I reached someone from the newspaper who was able to assure me this was not a sign the Mesa-based publication had folded. In fact, the problem was technical and there were people working on it. By 3:40 p.m., the website appeared to be back up, but some sections were still not working. (See update No. 2 below.)
So what was the oversight? Nobody I spoke to knew for sure. But given the expiration message on the page, there’s a good chance the newspaper simply didn’t go through the process of renewing the web address “eastvalleytribune.com.”
Here’s the real kicker, though. The website address appears to have been registered through a service operated by the newspaper’s own parent company, Freedom Communications. The Orange County, Calif. company, which owns news outlets nationwide, apparently disabled the address when the Tribune, one of Freedom’s three largest newspapers, didn’t try to renew it. A message on the registration service’s website said the address expired, but it had since been renewed. Service should be back within 72 hours, the message said. “The domain should be reactivated shortly.”
Freedom has had its own struggles company-wide. It was recently rated by Moody’s Investment Services as one of the top 238 companies most likely to default on their loans. In March, the company announced it was forcing employees nationwide to take time off without pay to help save money.
Update: The Phoenix New Times spotted the website outage as early as 8:49 a.m. today. This means the website was down for at least six hours. Former Tribune reporter Ray Stern, now at the New Times, called the outage “another chapter of the newspaper’s Decline and Fall.”
Update No. 2: At 4:30 p.m., the site was down again. Ouch.
Update No. 3: The newspaper posted a note to readers at 5:36 p.m.: “Due to technical issues that we continue to work on, our web site, eastvalleytribune.com, has been experiencing periodic interruptions. We have been working on these issues to make sure the site is restored uninterrupted. We apologize for the inconvenience.”
Full disclosure: I, too, am a former Tribune reporter.