Welcome to LoudounExtra.com: Fall 2008

Dear Reader:

Thank you for visiting us here at LoudounExtra.com, your site for all things Loudoun.

When we launched on July 16, 2007, we brought you a site built around community news and information. Some highlights of our offerings included a comprehensive look at the 2007 high school football season, numerous photo galleries of events from around the county, a daily dose of the Living in Loco blog with Erica Garman, Daily Deals and several searchable community guides that feature everything you'd want to know about the local schools, local places of worship and local wineries.

As we come into our second year, we will continue to provide the coverage of local events and issues that our readers have come to expect, but we will also be stretching to serve Loudoun County better with more emphasis on the people who make Loudoun the fascinating place that it is. To that end, we recently launched a weekly feature called Up Close, in which we shine the spotlight on a Loudoun resident in a Q&A-style interview. We publish them every Tuesday and are on the lookout for quirky, fun and engaging people to interview. The suggestion box is open, and we'd love to hear who you think we should feature. Send us a note, and we'll follow up with you on your advice. (For an example of one installment of Up Close that was suggested by a reader, check out Up Close: Dylan Love.)

Beyond sending us recommendations for Up Close, we would like to encourage you to contribute to the site more generally. Without your participation, LoudounExtra.com will not be as rich and dynamic of a community as it can be.

We want you to think of this space as a communal gathering place, and one way to do that is to allow you a way to share your photos. We have been and will be sending out specific calls for photo-sharing opportunities. Currently, you can e-mail them to loudounextra@wpni.com with the corresponding caption information, and we will post them online in a gallery for your neighbors and friends to see. For example, we had great success with a user-submitted gallery on youth swimming this summer. (You can view it here.)

Just in time for the 2008 high school football season, we will have in place a way for readers to upload their photos directly and more simply to the site. Shortly after the photo tool launches, we will also introduce a way for you all to share videos as well. As we launch these new features, we look forward to hearing from you about your thoughts on them and how we can try to improve them.

We have also started to run what we are calling the Weekend Roundup that highlights a few events from around the county that you might want to attend. We've chosen Thursday as the day to run that, because we hope that it will help you plan your weekend activities in advance.

In the coming months, you will also notice that our home page will go through a bit of a face-lift. We will move some things around, subtract some pieces and add others in their place. We ask you to be patient with us during this time, but we also hope to hear from you about the changes once they are made.

Finally, we want to make sure that you feel empowered to contact us with your story ideas, raves and gripes. If you'd like to get in touch with one of our full-time staff members directly, please check out this page for contact information. We strive for excellence, and you can help keep us honest, accurate and a true reflection of Loudoun County.

Amy L. Kovac
Local Community Editor
LoudounExtra.com/washingtonpost.com

Your Thoughts...

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