Community newspaper website upgrade promises better experience for users

Changes include online obituary scheduling system, searchable database

Easttexasnews.com had its humble beginning in the 1990s, when the world wide web was in its infancy. In those days (an unbelievable 30-plus years ago), everyone was intent on creating the perfect website name to represent their business. Polk County Publishing (PCPC), the parent company of this newspaper, had the foresight to choose easttexasnews.com.

It is an interesting and true story that sometime later, another news organization in East Texas threatened to take PCPC to court to sue for the rights to the website name easttexasnews.com. They failed in their attempt.

Over the years, we transitioned from one to several individual newspaper websites, but continued to maintain easttexasnews.com. In 2020, a big decision was made to merge all the individual websites back into one strong, healthy and convenient news location for our complete coverage area. Today, we consider easttexasnews.com its own digital newspaper, with lead articles written by our own local journalists about stories of interest to all East Texans.

Our most recent heavily followed stories include the floods and damage to our region during the past month and follow up information on how residents and businesses can file for flood damage assistance; the murder of a child and the accused killer’s subsequent arrest and indictment; the death of a student who was run over just steps after exiting the school bus in front of his home; Naskila’s plan to build a state-of-the-art casino hotel on tribal lands in Polk County; and an explosion at a chemical plant that caused several counties to shelter in place while authorities assessed the potential danger.

I would like to also announce that beginning June 1, individuals and funeral homes will have the opportunity to place obituaries online for their loved ones or clients, 24 hours a day, seven days a week at easttexasnews.com. The program will be very similar to our online legal notice system that has been in place successfully since April of 2023. Both legal notices and obituaries are searchable and run in our print papers, in addition to the online version that is archived on easttexasnews.com.

Thank you for taking the time to read these updates. We appreciate your business and are committed to continue providing quality journalism for our community.