Announcing the reported.ly website beta

I’m excited to announce that we’ve just launched our first website beta!

Wait — reported.ly has a website?!?

Yep — and we’re hoping you’ll help us kick the tires.

When we launched reported.ly back in January, we started as social media-only, but aspired to have a website some day. We felt it was important to establish ourselves first and foremost among the communities we hoped to serve on Twitter, Facebook and other social platforms. And we’re off to a pretty good start.

But one of the challenges of serving as a “social-first” news startup is that it’s hard for people to get a sense of how our coverage on different news topics builds up over time. Plenty of us love living in the moment on social, but let’s face it — it’s an ephemeral experience. We knew that eventually we’d need some sort of home base to document all the work our team has been doing, so this website beta is our first attempt at doing just that.

The new website is set up so you can keep up with our daily coverage or dive deeper into the stories we’ve done on a particular topic. So if you’re interested in our migration coverage, for example, you’ll be able to see our work spanning the globe from North Africa to Southeast Asia, including our latest Google Earth video tour — a simulation of what it’s like for African migrants to cross the Mediterranean.

Meanwhile, we’re testing out a new feature we’re calling reported.ly now. As the name suggests, it’s basically a dashboard of our most recent work across all the social media platforms we use. So whether we’re live-tweeting a story, instagramming, writing a news digest for Facebook, etc, you’ll be able to monitor all of that work as it comes in. It’s very much a work-in-progress, but we hope it’ll give our community members a way to catch up on whatever’s going on at the moment. Meanwhile, we’re also going old-school and adding RSS feeds for the site, as well as for the major topics we cover.

There’s still a lot of work that needs to be done on the site — hence that big ‘ol “Beta” stamped at the top — but we felt it was far enough along to open it up to all of you and get a sense of what you think of it. So please check out the reported.ly website beta and let us know what you think. We’ve set up this handy form for feedback; you can also reach us on Twitter at @reportedly, or on Facebook or reddit. Thanks!