The past couple of months have been a period of great change for The Bond Buyer- not unlike the atmosphere in the markets we cover. I wanted to take a moment today to bring you up to date on some of the changes and how they impact you.
The most visible aspect has been the relaunch of our Web site. The new version of The Bond Buyer Online is truly a 21st century Web presence.
Our top goal was to make the site easier to navigate - as our regular users know, there's a wealth of information available on the site, and our newsroom staff, led by editors Gary Siegel and Yong Lim, has worked tirelessly to augment our reports with additional graphics, video interviews, polls, and original-source documents like guidance from the regulatory agencies in Washington.
Other improvements include the new "print this article" feature, a series of topic-specific e-mail newsletters, and the new "view the print edition" feature, in which you can see the paper layout on your computer screen (although it's not printable or forwardable).
But navigating the Web isn't like flipping through the printed newspaper - it was too easy to miss these great features if you didn't know to look for them. The new site, which was built in-house by our Skokie, Ill.-based development team (pictured), changes that dramatically, and already we've noticed our users accessing more pages on every visit. We hope that trend continues: We want you to find The Bond Buyer Online to be the most useful hub for municipal bond information on the Web.
There are more improvements still to come. We've restructured our archive to make it easier to find historical news articles without having to sort through reams of repetitive data on sales results. Now we're working hard to create a new interface for searching just the sales results, so that our online archive users will have access to more than a decade of detailed market history.
Those of you reading this in print have experienced some changes, too. Due to the constantly rising costs of production and delivery, we have been forced to discontinue printing the results of bond sales on a daily basis. They're still available online every day, and will be printed in "digest" format every Monday, but they will not be in the paper in their old format.
We apologize for any inconvenience, but felt this step was necessary to allow us to continue to invest in the broad-based news coverage that is the core of our franchise, and the main reason you subscribe to The Bond Buyer.
If you have any questions - and especially if you'd like to subscribe to our upgraded Web site - please call our customer service department at 800-982-0633.
Michael Stanton is the publisher of The Bond Buyer. He welcomes your comments on this or any other issues related to the newspaper and its Web site at
