If you visit the  Arizona Daily Star newspaper website, you’ll notice that the url has changed. Instead of using AZstarnet.com for its url, the newspaper can now be found on the Tucson.com domain name. All articles that once appeared on AZstarnet.com have been migrated and now forward to Tucson.com urls.
Historical Whois records show that the newspaper company has owned this domain name since at least 2000 (this is the earliest archived record). The domain name had reportedly previously been used as more of an events-related website prior to the change. The company plans to introduce a paywall at some point in the near future.
I am not all that familiar with the Arizona Daily Star, but this transition is interesting to me. From my perspective, the rebranding would appear to potentially limit the newspaper’s reporting area. In my opinion, the Arizona Daily Star branding is much more general to a wider Arizona-focused reporting area, while Tucson.com is more specific and regional. That said, my local news website, Boston.com, seems to handle that potential limition fairly well, sharing news from the greater Boston region and not simply Boston proper.
Dylan Smith from TucsonSentinel.com has a much more comprehensive article about the transition.
I am interesting in reading what you think of this rebranding, especially from those who live in the area.
That is weird, seems limiting. Maybe Tucson will be the actual brand name, or that’s where their main audience is. Could be a number of things, see if they’ll do an interview 😀
It seems too broad for me. I might expect travel not news.
The re-branding of the local daily morning newspaper website to Tucson.com, for the Southern Arizona area, makes more sense than the previous arrangement.
As I understand it, it goes something like this: the Tucson metro morning newspaper, The Arizona Daily Star (AZStarNet.com), owned by Lee Enterprises, and the now-deceased afternoon newspaper, The Tucson Citizen (TucsonCitizen.com), owned by Gannett Co. Inc., had some decades ago entered into a joint operating agreement under the auspices of a company called Tucson Newspapers Inc.
TNI has the printing plant, takes care of distribution and back office stuff. And eventually, TNI had to come to terms with the new fad Internet WWW thing. Someone at TNI and/or Lee had a bright idea and procured the Tucson.com domain name. But TNI, under the JOA, has to manage and promote two newspapers. The Arizona Daily Star settled on AZStarNet.com domain. The Tucson Citizen went with the more obvious TucsonCitizen.com domain. Circa 2009, Tucson Citizen died (http://tucsoncitizen.com/morgue/2009/05/16/116643-our-epitaph/). TucsonCitizen.com then became a blog, of sorts, until Gannett decided to pull the plug on even that feeble little thing.
However, Gannett is still in the JOA with Lee via TNI. So around 2009, AZStarNet.com became the main domain of Tucson newspapers (including dead newspapers) and tried to funnel web traffic into each newspapers’ respective site(s)and/or blog(s).
For the last several years, the domain Tucson.com has often been on “hiatus” (redirecting to AZStarNet.com after 5 seconds), as the management at TNI couldn’t seem to figure out how to make a viable business venture with the domain.
So lacking any particular management of Tucson.com by TNI/Gannett/Lee, it does make sense that someone finally decided the only remaining daily newspaper in print should actually use the more intuitively obvious domain name that they already own. As the City of Tucson is the major metro, cultural, tourism, business, and population area for Pima, Santa Cruz, Chochise, and parts of Pinal, Graham and Greenlee Counties, Tucson.com could work as a regional website. (With apologies to Tombstone, Chochise County, AZ. [Go ahead and check out the Tombstone.com website. Whoopsie.])
The Arizona Daily Star using the domain Tucson.com as opposed to the non-intuitive AZStarNet.com is an improvement. Still not, IMO, not the highest and best use of Tucson.com, but an improvement in any case.
Nice detail Hugh Giblin. Does anyone want to build a pair of geodomains or a sporting one or a one about CigarettesAndWeed[.com (CIS)]?