Philly.com Absorbs Inky, Daily News Sites

The Daily News website is now a sub-brand of Philly.com.

Inquirer.com and PhillyDailyNews.com are no more. As announced in October, the websites of the city’s two major news sites have been swallowed up by the online mothership, Philly.com, though both now have their own landing pages on that site. (The old links re-direct users to those landing pages.)

Rather than act as standalone portals to those papers, though, Philly.com/Inquirer and Philly.com/DailyNews each give highlights from the respective publications — to dive deep into the news, users will have to explore the broader Philly.com site.

“We see the Philly.com homepage as the big tent, and the Inquirer and Daily News landing pages as a destination for people who want that pure experience,” said Eric Ulken, executive director of digital strategy for Interstate General Media, which owns the websites and the newspapers. “We want to continue to do justice to their needs, but remind people that Philly.com is the clearinghouse for the best of both.”

The debut of the landing pages also includes the debut of their nifty-looking counterparts on Philly.com’s mobile site. (See the Inky mobile landing page at left.) Philly.com’s mobile app, however, hasn’t been changed to reflect recent changes (including the addition of an opinion section to the site). Ulken said some of those changes will occur in the first few months of 2015.

“Increasingly, digital is mobile,” Ulken said. “If we’re not thinking about mobile equally with desktop, we’re doing something wrong.”

While today’s move is a big deal, Ulken and Mike Topel, Philly.com’s executive editor, seemed as pleased with the debut of an Inquirer story about the rise of the new Comcast building. The multimedia treatment, they said, is a preview of things to come at Philly.com.

“That’s like our best longform (story) yet,” Topel said. “That’s where we want to go.”