The Salem News folks recently redesigned the format so it's almost a tabloid -- a long, skinny…read moretabloid. And they added a "screamer" headline on Page 1 (whatever the Big Story of the day is, is placed in the right-hand column with a huge bold-type header). It's okay, but there are only so many ways you can design a newspaper. It should always be easy to handle and page-turn, easy to fold, and easy for the eye to follow. Especially the eyes of older readers, who comprise, I suspect, the majority of Salem News subscribers. It would be nice to have a slightly larger type/font size for news and bulletin board items, but the publisher needs to save ink and paper, so it ain't gonna happen. To the SN's credit, they do make the editorial pages' layout cleaner and easy to follow, but maybe that's so not even one older set of eyes will miss the publisher/corporation's opinion on things. ;-) There is just enough local news (I live in Salem) to make it readable; if I want real "Salem News," I get a copy of the weekly Salem Gazette from one of the freebie boxes around the city. The AP filler news and feature items have all been posted on the Internet news sites days before the SN publishes them, but we know that this is a sign of the times. The best thing about the paper is the Police blotter (I happen to like the humor in the non-serious-crime items, despite what other reviewers might say), Dear Abby and the comics, though I am REALLY PISSED that "For Better Or For Worse" was dumped, unannounced, and replaced by the vapid "Dustin" strip. What the hell is up with that? Intelligent, creative, perceptive, original and genuinely full of real-life humor, Lynn Johnston's strip is far superior to the empty-headed, gag-type, unfunny crap that passes for "comic strips" that increasingly take the place of good stuff. Was "FBOFW" too expensive for the SN? I would like an explanation! Salem News (I still call it the Salem Evening News; old habits...) is a small-town local paper published by a big-ass corporation with headquarters in another state. As there are not many small, family-owned newspapers left, this should be no surprise. But, the reporters and editors are local yokels, and they write about local things, so except perhaps for the editorial influence of a "foreign" owner reaching its corporate fingers out into our little community, at least we have local people writing for local people.

The scam now is no physical paper on Tuesdays and Saturdays. Started during covid...but never went…read moreback. Still paying an outrageous price for this rag.

Hire this firm at your own peril. If you are thinking about working with them, email me and I will…read moreshare my experience - this is singularly the worst experience we have ever had with a vendor - they are not a reputable firm and we are commencing legal action against them. We retained BlueLuna on February 17, 2012, over one year ago to build an integrated website that includes a new online learning management system, a front end website, and and ecommerce system to replace our existing integrated site. They were very competitive and were also really easy to work with. Blue Luna made a proposal which we accepted that estimating the project to take 9 weeks, payments in 4 installments - $8,750 upon acceptance, $6,125 on week 3, $7,350 in week 7, and the final payment upon website launch on week 9 of $2,450. Blue Luna requested payments according to the schedule and we made the first three payments per the agreement by week 7, totaling $22,050. There hasn't been a meaningful update in over a year since when the project began, and the current project is in a state of disarray. Last month, Michael Austin, our primary contact there told me that they are unable to complete the project. When we requested a refund for the $22,050 in fees that we paid BlueLuna for services that they did not provide, Michael refused the full refund and has yet to even offer a partial refund. After an extremely frustrating year trying to work with BlueLuna we will need to hire a new company to take on the project, and we had marketing and sales initiatives lined up last year that we had to cancel as a result. Some more background: The project was mismanaged by BlueLuna in almost every respect. From the beginning, we would not receive status updates for weeks at a time and when we were finally able to track them down it was only after multiple attempts to reach them over the phone and via email. When we did get a hold of them, there would be no meaningful updates - it would usually be along the lines of "we understand you are frustrated, let's schedule a time next week once we get a handle on this" and then the process of trying to get a hold of them the next week would begin again. For a very long time, we were extremely - overly - patient with them. We just wanted the project done but there was no one on the other side seriously engaging with us. I am attaching an email I sent to our primary contact at BlueLuna, Michael Austin- one of over 100 emails to him and to our other contact try to get status updates over the last yea: From me, February 27, 2013: "I am going to get back to Jennie but I wanted to express my disappointment about our experience working with blueLuna. I think we have been incredibly patient throughout this process, with the slow development process, the turnover, the missed phone calls, deadlines, etc. but in the last month it has gotten completely unacceptable. I have emailed you and called you multiple times to try to understand what the status is of our project and I haven't gotten a response. It is one of the most unprofessional situations I have encountered in my career. I need to have a conversation with you about this please let me know your availability this week." A response from Michael, over a week later: "I fully understand, I can talk mostly any time this week. Please let me know what works best for you and I will try and align." That has been the typical back and forth "I fully understand" followed by BlueLuna telling us some action will take place, and nothing happens. The company has ignored this project so blatantly that they didn't even know where their own latest development files were - we had to point out where their files were housed.

Take Your Web Dev Budget Elsewhere. I paid BlueLuna tens of thousands of dollars to develop an…read moree-commerced website. It took them over one year to "complete", they never picked up the phone when I called, I was required to do all testing and quality checking myself, I was humiliated at my launch party when the site still didn't work, and I lost all my initial customers due to a poorly structured payment gateway. Far from professional in my opinion.